Thread by @alpha_pls

Airdrops have been a huge part of this cycle so far.

I was curious to know how many tokens that launched with an airdrop are actually higher than their day 1 launch price.

And this would probably answer the question of whether you should ever hold an airdrop? (is it +EV to hold?)

I crunched the data. Used prices from this morning, so slightly stale, but I think you can get the general gist of things. I only decided to go as far as tokens in the top 500.

Here are the main takeaways:

• 23 out 31 tokens are down since their first day of launch - some are down really bad
• Only 4 out of 31 tokens have beaten BTC since their first day of launch
• Only 1 of the tokens that has beaten BTC was launched in 2024
• Two meme related airdrops have been wildly successful - BONK and DEGEN
• Despite the current hate, TIA is also well above its launch price and has outperformed BTC

Selling airdrops on launch day into USD or BTC will almost always be the right move. You can get lucky (some call it skill) timing an initial move up post launch, but generally speaking the longer you hold the worse the performance.

Yes, there will always be a few outliers, but the odds are massively against you holding the right airdrop, even more so relative to BTC.

If you are really bullish on the long term prospects of a project than you almost always get a better chance to buy lower than launch day. The next bear market may see some of these tokens become better investments. There are some good projects on this list for sure.

Airdrops aren't the only reason the tokens of these projects are down. A lot of the time they have set their valuations far to high with market makers. Users ruthlessly dumping the airdrop is a way of them finding out pretty quickly that their own designated valuation is complete nonsense.

Many are learning this cycle that FDV actually does matter. Holding airdrops means you think tokens have enough demand to go up in price whilst big unlocks occur and investors hedge with shorts.

Yield farmers will also always sell regardless of price, as they are just here to extract yield and move on. However, in theory, tokens should be able to recover from the mercenaries exiting, but in most cases the data suggests they don't. Of course there is still time for some of these tokens. This is just a random snapshot and things can change quickly for some of these alts.

People like to complain that many airdrops have been badly designed, but based on this data it seems very hard to execute an airdrop to the community without it being detrimental to the token in the short and medium term (long term tbc).

Two surprise airdropped meme coins (no points programme) with very low starting valuations have returned the best for holders. Both were designed to help grow different ecosystems (Solana and Farcaster).

We have also seen many meme airdrops go to zero instantly in the past, so you certainly can't just assume meme airdrops are going to necessarily perform better. Surprise + low valuation could be the better takeaway.

I actually think points programmes are here to stay as they are a very common feature of web2 and can contribute to a more fun, positive & sticky UX, but I'm not expecting airdrops to continue in the same form we have seen in the years to come.

Based on this data projects should think very carefully about what form their airdrop takes, or if they decide to do an airdrop at all.