Web3 airdrops lead college students to the path of financial freedom.

Author: Biteye's junior sister Kiki

Editor: Biteye's core contributor Crush

01 Preface

It is said that college graduates are unemployed as soon as they graduate. The junior sister, who doesn't believe in superstitions, ultimately cannot escape this curse.

Being unemployed all the time is not a solution. When I saw that my former employer, Biteye, was still hiring, I went to ask the boss with a straight face if I could come back, lamenting that I regretted leaving in the first place.

Just as an intern senior brother left, leaving a position vacant, I quickly joined as an operator.

While I was lamenting the bad environment and worrying that it would be difficult to find a job after the senior brother left, a bolt from the blue came when I heard that the senior brother left for financial freedom, OMG!

While collective reset is terrifying, the success of colleagues is even more distressing. Indeed, sometimes the gap between people is even greater than that between people and dogs!

In order to land a job like the senior brother as soon as possible, under my continuous harassment (inviting him to dinner), I finally inquired about some details.

02 Senior brother's entry into the circle

The senior brother probably entered the circle in 2021, and I believe that the old-timers in the circle should not have forgotten what happened in 2021.

That year, the senior brother stood with his hands in his pockets, not knowing what it meant to have an opponent.

From being recommended Shib at the beginning, to later hitting the jackpot with Baby Doge, with an initial investment of 3000 RMB, he made a killing in various dog-related projects during the animal frenzy at that time, and his assets briefly reached a million.

Baby Doge in June 2021

Although compared to some big shots, this amount of money is not much, for a young person in their twenties, making a million from scratch in just a few months is simply like a dream.

Yes, it really was like a dream, and soon, the day when the beautiful dream was shattered arrived.

As the frenzy around dog-related projects declined, various tokens began to plummet one after another. The senior brother always wanted to wait for a rally and then sell, but each time the coin price hit a new low.

After going round and round, he ended up back where he started.

At the beginning of 2022, the senior brother still started a new money-making path with the same 3000 RMB, but this time, he started "lurking".

03 First pot of gold

Like many others, the senior brother's journey of "lurking" also started with the evil source, Galaxy (which has now betrayed the masses and plans to charge users, and has been criticized to pieces).

Due to the small amount of initial capital, he experienced what it felt like to have his legs broken as soon as he entered the market.

At that time, almost everyone playing NFTs was trading on OpenSea. Although OpenSea had a large amount of traffic, it was relatively centralized, charging high transaction fees and making a fortune in silence without issuing tokens.

For the Web3 industry, which is deeply rooted in "decentralization", this was intolerable. Therefore, various projects often clamored to overthrow OpenSea. You won't issue tokens, right? Then I'll do it for you!

Soon, the trash talk became a reality. A project called OpenDAO, which sounded similar to OpenSea, began airdropping tokens worth hundreds of dollars, such as $SOS, with a simple requirement that you just needed to be a user of OpenSea.

The senior brother said that on the afternoon he heard about the airdrop, he was waiting for the subway. Excited and at the same time a little uneasy, because at that time, NFTs on the mainnet cost tens of dollars to operate, and many times he couldn't bear to do it.

But at the moment he opened the airdrop page, all the complex emotions disappeared, and the only thing left in his mind was "regret, so much regret".

But this was actually within his expectations. This was like in student days, there were always people who didn't work hard usually, but fantasized about having a sudden inspiration during the exam, or the teacher making a mistake in grading, having good luck, and then getting a high score. How could that be possible?

After this blow, he said he no longer hesitated, and with the determination of "if I lose, I'll just go work in a factory", he started doing tasks for Galaxy girls with some airdrop bloggers.

Although he still didn't have enough money to operate on the mainnet, he did all the other tasks. Although he didn't get the highest level of Galaxy girl NFT in the end, he also received a few thousand dollars' worth of airdrops, which was his first pot of gold.

04 Some gains

After having some initial capital, the senior brother started to look at some projects that were becoming more upscale.

For example, at that time, there was a blogger on Weibo who said that staking ATOM, without doing anything, could easily get airdrops. The senior brother said he was indeed tempted and planned to buy 100 ATOM and stake them all.

After researching a bit, he found out that he needed to download a Keplr wallet, and there were also a bunch of chains that needed to be dealt with back and forth, which seemed quite troublesome, so he didn't go for staking.

It's a good thing he didn't stake this thing, as at that time, ATOM, which was worth tens of dollars, is now only worth 4 dollars.

Not to mention that there were no major airdrops, the staking threshold also increased from 5 ATOM all the way up, and in the later stages, many projects didn't airdrop to ATOM stakers at all.

If he had bought ATOM at a high price and held it until now, he would probably be in tears!

After giving up staking ATOM, the senior brother didn't know what else he could do. When he saw other bloggers starting to do airdrops for layer2, such as ARB and ZK, he also joined in and created around ten accounts for each project.

After a few months, he started to study Starknet, but at that time, he found it too slow and difficult to use, and only interacted with 5 accounts before giving up.

During this period, he also encountered some projects that went to zero, such as Aztec in the privacy sector, and found that the project disappeared while he was working on it.

There were no airdrops for about half a year, and he said he once thought about whether to leave the circle, feeling that the dividends from "lurking" had disappeared, but he hadn't earned enough and was very unwilling.

The boring days were completely shattered in March 2023, when ARB's great airdrop brought a huge harvest to the "lurkers".

The senior brother's 15 accounts finally lurked 30,000 coins, and as soon as the exchange opened, he sold them all, making almost 40,000 dollars, enough to buy a Tesla.

The senior brother secretly told me that the cost of lurking ARB was very low, maybe just over ten dollars for one account. In this way, each account probably had a return of over a hundred times, truly a big "lurker".

Looking back at the current airdrops, not only are they scarce, but they are also full of tricks and traps, truly miserable.

With the end of the ARB airdrop, the entire airdrop industry entered a period of fomo, and many studios and older individuals began to flood into the airdrop race.

Seeing everyone getting more and more involved, the senior brother also didn't dare to be negligent. As soon as he got the profits from ARB, he immediately reinvested, creating dozens of ZK mainnet accounts, and also picked up the Starknet accounts again to continue working. Busy every day, he really felt like he would earn a lot less money if he was a step slower.

After just experiencing a big "lurker", the senior brother's overall state was obviously much better than before, and he was full of enthusiasm for interacting.

After that, he basically spent two to three months brushing the transaction volume of ZK. During this time, he also encountered the launch of Cyberconnect, as a brother project of Galaxy, he naturally did it, although the airdrop he received was just a small amount, it covered the cost of interacting with ZK.

Later, there were more on-chain dog airdrops, such as Aidoge on ARB and Cheems on ZK, and although the airdrops were not large, the quantity made it possible to achieve negative-cost "lurking".

05 Single Project A7

The next turning point occurred in July 2023. At that time, the senior brother saw some insider information from somewhere, it seemed that some big "lurkers" had started "lurking" Starknet, could it be that something big was really coming?

After seeing a significant increase in the number of addresses on the Starknet chain, and with no airdrop messages from Zksync, the senior brother gritted his teeth and went all in on Starknet, thinking "if I die, so be it!"

At that time, many studios were already using fingerprint browsers + synchronizers for operations. If you don't know what this is, it doesn't matter, it's just a tool that improves efficiency.

But the senior brother always believed that manual operation was more reliable. Although automation saved time, it would be more trouble than it was worth if discovered.

The strategy he adopted was manual operation, large-scale entry, small transactions and large loans, then moving the funds out, and leaving some balance in each account, not transferring everything out, making it look more like a real person, haha.

The next two months of summer vacation, without academic burdens, were a crazy phase of creating new accounts.

During one summer vacation, he created a total of 100 new accounts, and ensured that each account was active on-chain every week.

It wasn't until September, after the start of the school year, that this frequency had to be reduced. From being active every week, it became every two weeks, and later on, it was only monthly, but fortunately, he persisted, and in the end, most accounts had at least one interaction every month.

At that time in 2023, I was also about to enter the circle. In fact, the second half of 2023 didn't have much market activity. But even so, the senior brother said that he almost got rich again during that summer vacation. (Huh? Why did I say "again"? 555~)

It was during the time he was interacting in the summer that he casually got a token called ethi, costing $50.

At the time, he didn't know what it was, but it rose to $2500, and he said that if he had held onto it until December, it would probably be worth $100,000 (Wow, is that true…), this was the closest he had come to getting rich.

By the end of 2023, apart from the token, another highlight was the social protocol Friendtech. (These days, I saw that Friendtech has given up contract permissions and completely gone downhill…)

It seemed that at that time, the senior brother was much more capable than before. Instead of taking over the key from KOL, he invested in several ETH and created a matrix of accounts.

Although he encountered many troubles along the way, such as the project changing the rules and getting his Twitter account suspended, fortunately, most of the accounts survived.

Soon, at the end of the New Year in 2024, good news came from Starknet.

The senior brother said that at the time, he was more nervous checking the airdrop than he was checking his college entrance exam results. As soon as he saw the airdrop criteria, and after manually checking a few large accounts, he knew that this wave was stable.

The results were impressive, about 110 accounts hit around 100 (the accounts that were brushed off were because they were done too late and didn't have enough activity for three months, unfortunately), and he received a total of over 100,000 tokens.

I secretly checked the price of Strk on the first day it opened, and it could be sold for at least $2 each, so 100,000 tokens would be about 1.5 million RMB, which was really shocking!

One of the criteria in the Stark airdrop brushed off many people, it required each account to have a certain balance.

But all of the senior brother's accounts had a balance that met the criteria. I asked him curiously how he thought of leaving a balance, and he said that at the time, he just wanted to leave some money to make it easier to pay fees for future interactions, it was purely accidental, but he was lucky, although I felt he was being modest.

In any case, with a combination of coincidences and several months of effort, the senior brother's total assets should have easily reached A7 in the year of his graduation. (A7 means assets in the seven figures, with a minimum of 1,000,000. I didn't dare to ask for a figure starting with anything other than A7, after all, he went from Stark to A7.15 in one wave.)

06 Continue to Harvest

Stark set a good start for 2024, and in the subsequent market, the senior brother went into a money-printing mode, harvesting like crazy.

He consecutively "lurked" 10 Bitcoin smiley face NFTs and several hundred Baby Dragon NFTs, with profits of tens of thousands of dollars for each.

In March and April, the cross-chain bridge Wormhole announced an airdrop. Although he had only interacted with over $10,000 when crossing Sei, he still received 8000U in airdrops for a single account.

In May, Friendtech quickly arrived, and the matrix accounts he had previously set up received a total of over 20,000 tokens, selling for about $30,000.

The Pizza airdrop in June was even more of a big surprise: when he drew a whitelist for Bitsmiley in February, he distributed 100 wallets to participate in a draw on OKX, and in early May, he consolidated these BTC to stake in Solv Protocol. As a result, almost every wallet had a transfer record, and he accidentally "lurked" 8000 Pizza.

This wave could be considered as a windfall, and his colleagues said they had enjoyed several days of feasting (I hadn't joined the company at that time, so I missed out 🙃).

After these waves of airdrop bombardment, the senior brother finally had a feeling of having earned enough, so he chose to resign.

You already know the rest of the story, just like it was written at the beginning. Soon, I returned to Biteye through an interview, and we both completed the handover perfectly, with a bright future ahead for everyone.

07 No More "Lurking"!

Good times don't last long, and the rise and fall seems to be an eternal law.

After "lurking" ZK for 3 years, they finally couldn't hold back from issuing tokens, but the senior brother wasn't very happy.

Because he only got over 10,000 tokens with one large account, most were "Not eligible", and in total, he only had tens of thousands of tokens, and the unfortunate thing was that he still hasn't sold those tokens…

Another cross-chain bridge project, Layerzero, seemed to be even worse, and it didn't even get as much as the free Wormhole. He only sold 1000U from 30 accounts, it could be said that it was a negative-cost "lurking".

In fact, for the second half of the year, most of the airdrops from projects started to become negative-cost, although he was lucky enough to avoid most of them.

However, the bleak market conditions also caused his assets to suffer an unprecedented major shrinkage: the few remaining smiley face NFTs seemed to be close to zero, and the 100 Baby Dragon NFTs couldn't even drop to below $50 each. Although he exchanged Friendtech for ETH, the price of ETH dropped, and the Pizza was exchanged for BTC, which also dropped. Not to mention the remaining Stark, it was almost gone…

With the shrinking of his assets and no new airdrops coming in, although he didn't mention resigning, I could clearly feel that he was somewhat regretful.

But regrets are useless, haha, I can only wait for the next time I get rich, and then give the position to the senior brother!

08 Conclusion

The senior brother has always emphasized that he was just lucky, and it was only because of the good market conditions in the past two years that he was able to make some big gains.

Although I also admit that market conditions are indeed very important, personal ability must have also played a significant role. Otherwise, why wasn't it me who got rich during the good market conditions? 😭

In summary, I found that the senior brother's ability to make big gains always revolved around the following two points.

One is the ability to filter. He can identify more than 90% of scam projects, filter out advertising or non-substantive KOLs, which allows him to focus most of his energy on reliable projects;

The other is execution. Completing interactions manually for dozens or even hundreds of accounts requires a lot of energy and perseverance.

At that time, the senior brother was a master's student with not much academic pressure. His strong filtering ability, sufficient time, and good execution ability allowed him to make so many big gains.

Although the current airdrop track is in a slump, after communicating with the senior brother, I did learn a lot. I hope that one day in the future, when the big gains come, everyone can seize the opportunity and make it to shore! 🥰

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