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Stack Digest #4 - Airdrops are cooked

Recognizing and rewarding the relationships that matter

👋 Welcome!

The Stack digest is a weekly newsletter about loyalty programs, points, and roundup on all things Stack enjoyed in 5 mins or less.

What's covered 👇

🤑 Airdrops are cooked - bradorbradley.eth's take on how we went from "surprise and delight" to "disappointing expectation"

📰 Points meta must-reads - why points are here to stay and how to make sense of them from Arthur Hayes, Kenton.eth, and Graeme Boy (Stack's founder and CEO)

🤔 Stack.so what?
Stack enables anyone to create and manage a loyalty points program onchain. Our mission is to recognize and reward the relationships that matter. Stack is for creators, communities, applications, and businesses of all types, stages, and budgets.

🤑 Airdrops are cooked

Remember when you were actually surprised to receive an airdrop? The delight you felt? I remember my first airdrop like it was yesterday. I had claimed bradorbradley.eth (because bradley.eth and brad.eth were already taken) and exploded with joy when I learned that I had earned a few thousand dollars in $ENS for being an early adopter. It was a bull market, dopamine levels were off the charts, everyone felt like Sergito:

Fast-forward to today and airdrops are expected, and more often than not, a disappointment. It feels like airdrop farmers far outweigh the number of "real users" who are authentically interested in - and excited by - the projects they engage with. At the same time, it seems like many crypto projects have deprioritized, if not outright abandoned, building products for people that might actually value on merit over potential financial upside.

In 2024 we find ourselves in a dynamic where:

  • Supposedly-innovative infra projects build faux-communities of mostly-farmers

  • Farmers, project teams, and VCs/investors build hype to convince others the community is authentic and durable

  • Project airdrops token, everyone cashes out immediately, and the "community" is revealed to be the same group of profit-maximizing farmers from the previous airdrop

This coordinated pump-and-dump scheme is nothing new, but the playbook seems to be decreasingly effective with each successive attempt. Farmers must continually lower their expectations due to disappointing returns, as illustrated by the June '24 Blast airdrop, Bcheque shared:

That's why I am declaring the airdrop playbook of the last several years officially, finally - cooked. While few dispute that tokens and airdrops will continue to play a key role in the onchain economy, many are looking for solutions to make airdrops great / surprising/ effective/ meaningful/ useful again.

Many crypto KOLs believe points will play an important role in the next era of airdrops and token distributions and help solve some of the problems outlined above. Check them out below 👇

-bradorbradley.eth

Points meta must-reads

👉 Pointenomics 101 - Kenton.eth shares an in-depth analysis of how a new era of digital loyalty is dawning in Web3, powered by innovative point systems.

🏀 Points Guard - Arthur Hayes shares a history of participation and ownership, and how points combine the best aspects of ICOs and yield farming

⏹ Beyond Tokens: The Era of Onchain Points - Graeme Boy, CEO of Stack, makes the case for points onchain

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