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You’re back in the Slipstream. Your weekly cheat codes to becoming financially and mentally free in a rapidly changing world.

You’re here because you know one thing to be true:

The better the quality of your ideas, the better the quality your life

Today’s issue is going to be a real step-up.

As the first one for the year, I want to set you up to win in 2024

WEALTH/ CRYPTO

The closest thing to Free Money

It was less than 4 years ago, on the 1st of September 2020, when an announcement was made that forever changed the trajectory and innovative direction of the cryptocurrency and blockchain space.

Uniswap Labs, the team behind the Uniswap DEX, decided to airdrop 400 UNI tokens to every address that had used the protocol in the two years prior to that date.

To some of you, that previous sentence was as understandable as ancient Greek. What am I saying here?

Uniswap is a DEX - a DEcentralized eXchange. It’s a piece of software that runs 24/7 on the blockchain and allows you to trade tokens with a liquidity pool, instead of through a 3rd party intermediary like Binance or Coinbase.

Btw, those 3rd party exchanges are called CEXes (pronounced like sex lol), which stands for CEntralised eXchange.

Let’s go back. The ability to trade in a decentralised way was a significant innovation by the Uniswap team. It also introduced the new idea of community governance and ownership.

Another innovation is the idea of tokenisation. The ability to create tokens for a specific project that can be used in numerous ways. The tokens can be traded, and the project decides what function they hold. for example, they can be an entrance fee into a community, by every member needing to hold a minimum amount. They can also be used for governance, whereby the team puts decisions up for votes by the community, and each token representing a vote.

So bascially, the Uniswap team decided to create a token, called UNI, which is to be used to govern the protocol and handed over a portion of the company’s success and future to the community that supported them.

They were able to do this because of the immutable nature of the blockchain, where every transaction is recorded and every user that interacted with a specific application is denoted by the wallet address(es) they used.

So, after 2 years of building, the team reached a point where they wanted to reward the community that supported them. It was also a moment of decentralization, as prior to this all decisions about Uniswap was taken by the team in a relative vacuum. Now, with transparent governance and giving the community the ability to participate in the future of Uniswap, the future development of the protocol is derisked by having greater alignment between the investors, developers and users of the protocol

The First Airdrop

This was dubber the first “Airdrop” that happened in the cryptospace. Every wallet address that interacted with Uniswap before 1 September was eligible to claim 400 UNI tokens. The team had set aside 150 million tokens, meaning 375,000 individual wallets were eligible to claim the reward.

Today, at the current price of $6.35, these 400 tokens are worth $2,540. A significant amount of “free money”.

More impressive, the token reached an all time-high of $44.97 and was above $35 for about a month. If you cashed out UNI at $35 during that month, your airdrop would be worth $14,000, which translates to a little over R260,000 in South African money. That’s pretty much an annual salary for most young workers.

Yet, even more impressive, and sure to give you FOMO, is that this was the easiest airdrop to ever qualify for. The criteria where the simplest, and because it was a per wallet allocation, many people got multiple airdrops!

All you had to do was a single transaction which would have cost you about $10-20.

Think about the return on that. Even if you spent $50 and cashed out at today’s price, you’d get back $2500 and make a 50x return on your money, or a 5,000% return.

Read that again, a 5,000% return.

If you cashed out at above $35, you would be making a face-melting 280x or 28,000% return on that $50.

I don’t know a single market in the world that gives that kind of return, and repeatedly, like the crypto world does. It’s why I’m still here and determined to win in it.

That being said, I don’t want you to feel too bad about it.

Don’t let the missing out of this opportunity kill your enthusiasm for others. The fact that this happened is to be rejoiced, for it set the stage for a culture of airdrops to propagate. There’s many opportunities to come.

And as a personal aside, I had just returned to crypto in 2020 and eventually started trading on Uniswap. I had just heard about the idea of an airdrop and I’d hoped I was on the list.

I checked my first trade - it was the 3rd of September - 2 days too late!

This is just one story, of many, on how I missed out on some life-changing wealth by just a fraction. But there are also stories of making some serious gains too.

Crypto is a game of numbers, the more shots you take, the higher your chance of hitting something big.

Everything has a cost

While the idea of free money does sound exciting, I do want to point out that nothing is truly free.

Everything has a cost, if you look carefully enough.

In this case, the cost of an airdrop can be looked at across a few dimensions:

1. Cost of time

2. Cost of money to transact

3. Opportunity cost of capital

4. Cost of Risk

I’ll break each of these down a little.

Cost of time - because time is truly a limited resource. Time and attention are grouped together here, and represents the limitation that every human can only do so much in the day. If I spend time writing threads for X I might not have time to post photos on Instagram. In the crypto world, its similar, except there are hundreds of new applications competing for your time and attention. An airdrop is a way for protocols to pay for eyeballs. Your payment is your time and attention.

Cost of money to transact - because it takes money to make transactions on blockchains. And often the transaction fees you spend is how the protocols earn money. On Ethereum, transactions are the most expensive and can be $6 - $50, depending on the type of transaction and how busy the network is. However, on most other chains, the fees are much lower. For example, Solana, one of my favourite chains, has fees that are basically zero. Typical transactions are $0.00004 or something similar. Based on your budget, one can choose better blockchains on which to try for airdrops. These days, as it has become a design imperative, most blockchains have reduced their fees so that it is less than a dollar.

Opportunity cost of capital - as we all have limited amounts of wealth. You could put your money in Aave or MakerDAO or convert it to ETH and stake it in LIDO or convert them into LP tokens and add liquidity on a DEX. As applications develop, the amount of things you can do with your money on the blockchain keeps growing. The opportunity cost of standing still, or choosing a specific direction, means you do not choose all the others. As such, airdrops are a way for protocols to compete for your capital and try attract it to their ecosystems. The cost of putting your money in one protocol is that it is not in another where there might also be a chance for an airdrop.

Cost of Risk - because crypto is the wild west of finance. As an unregulated space, where “code is law”, improvements are made when flaws are made apparent, often through deliberate attacks on the system to try and gain access to the capital. The stories of protocols hacks or exploits are too numerous to mention, and if I had to tell you all the times I have been rugpulled (the technical term for when a hack/exploit/failure occurs and you lose money) I’d be writing a book.

Airdrops are great for companies and protocols

Even just rumors of airdrops gets users to move quickly. Airdrops are excellent incentives to get users to reallocate capital and try out the network and applications that run on it.

Airdrops provide massive publicity. When a big airdrop happens, a wave of euphoria enters the market as people often receive money they were not expecting. This creates a lot of positive publicity for the company/protocol which drives even more users to check it out.

Airdrops add legitimacy to the project. If the project was stealing money, or built in a shady way, they would not be able to do an airdrop. Often the money for an airdrop comes from transaction fees from users using the protocol but also investment capital coming from VCs mostly based in the US.

Airdrops are like customer acquisition costs, except you get to pay it in the future after you’ve acquired the customer and proven product-market fit.

Airdrops, when done right, are the single greatest way to build a loyal fanbase of die-hard users and strong community engagement. After all, how would you feel when one of your favourite tools that you spend money on, actually rewarded you with even more money than you spent?

For these reasons, and more to come, I believe airdrops are not going to go away any time soon from the crypto ecosystem and will remain a key feature that continues to bring in new users from web2 and traditional finance

The birth of a culture

Since the inaugural and legendary first airdrop, there have been many more.

In some cases, the announcement of an airdrop is known well in advance, as well as the criteria, and so users will need to spend capital and time to develop a transaction history that meet the criteria.

As more users try to game the system, by creating multiple wallets and faking transactions to simulate actual, genuine use, the protocols themselves have evolved in how they conduct an airdrop and decided the criteria. It’s a dual evolutionary competition. The airdrop hunters/ exploiters that want free money while doing the least work and the protocol engineers that want to reward actual users and build a community and not the fake users that want the free money to dump it and run.

Many interesting stories have abounded through the ecosystem since the first airdrop. I remember a story of a guy that simulated transactions across 200+ wallets for 3 months in anticipation of the 1inch airdrop. He was going to make more than $3mil from it, but the criteria was you needed to trade for over $20 per wallet. Turns out he traded for $17, A big L. I also missed this one but compared to this guy I don’t feel so bad.

More recently, the Solana ecosystem has been getting renewed attention and the Jito protocol did an airdrop to their users. Standard users reported getting a nice $10,000 Christmas bonus. Needless to say, I missed this one completely.

Airdrops in 2024

Today, at the start of 2024 airdrops are bigger and better than ever. The prediction is that $2B will be airdropped into users' hands this year.

As a reminder, here’s some of the Biggest Aidrops of all Time:

1. $ARB - $1.5b dropped to users, at $15b FDV. A win for me here, I managed to get about $3000 worth of airdrop across two wallets!

2. $ENS - $1b dropped, at $40b FDV. I missed this one as I didn’t have a .eth domain, but I did get a .crypto one. No airdrop on that one though (yet).

3. $dYdX - $900m, at $11b FDV. I missed this one by a few hours, still stings a bit.

This wave of free money cannot last forever, right? As more people find out about it, the criteria becomes stricter and the rewards potentially lower. But I also think we are still very early to the airdrop game. It will be around for many more years. For the reasons I mentioned above, they are web3’s way of marketing and attracting attention. Because crypto is still “niche”, a lot more marketing needs to be done to bring people over and airdrops are one of the best.

Now, time for action!

Would you like to make a little extra cash while also learning about a new, emerging tech field that is going to revolutionize finance?

Would you like to learn more about airdrops, and have someone to help enter this arena?

There’s many resources online. Youtube is the best. Twitter is great too, but it’s filled with scams and so I wouldn’t recommend going there to start. When it comes to crypto, it might take you a while to understand what is going on. To make sense of it all. To be ready to take the risk yourself, if you ever do.

All the while, protocols have their airdrops and people are making easy money. There is a cost to trying to do things yourself, both in risk of things going wrong and in that the time it will take you to get up to speed is significant. Your time has an opportunity cost to it.

As someone who’s been doing this for years, I wanted to bring awareness of this opportunity to my readers and community. I know we all can use a little extra money. Sometimes the best place to start is in a place where the risk is low and you get rewarded for trying. That’s why I believe working on Crypto Airdrops is something everyone should be doing in 2024.

I’m in a good position to guide newbies into this space and direct them to the highest returning, and most likely, airdrops. As it is an evolving, time sensitive thing, being close to the pulse of the market is key. As the ecosystem evolves, it takes a team to be on top of all the opportunities and even full time you would find it difficult to qualify for all the airdrops happening right now. I know I did, and missed out on a few good ones as a result. I wont let that happen again.

This is why Airdrop Hunting is a key part of The Crew, my online community I’ve been hinting about.

It’s for people who are serious about making some extra money on the side and learning about crypto. I’ll be sharing the alpha and my lessons and best practices from my own experiences these past 5+ years in crypto.

I’ll be running a free trial for The Crew this month for anyone who’s interested. Thereafter it’s going to be $10 per month. With one airdrop you’ll make back 10x your annual fees, so the amount of value is insane if you think about it.

Anyways, If you’d want to be part of The Crew, and work with a community of like-minded individuals towards financial freedom, or maybe just know more, reply to this email with “I want to join The Crew”.

1. Re-wire your brain to get RICH in 12 mins - YouTube

   • Dan Henry is a business genius, and breaks it down why you (and I) haven’t become financially free yet.

   Anthony Chaffee on the benefits of a carnivore diet - Jerm Warfare

   • Excellent conversation between South African podcaster Jerm and Carnivore advocate and Doctor, Anthony Chaffe

2. The Six Pillars of Self Esteem - YouTube

   • One of the most important books on understanding and building self-esteem. A must-listen for everyone!

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