How Are Airdrops Beneficial?For developers, an airdrop is a market entry strategy that attracts a loyal audience. This model has proven to be more effective compared to token sales, taking into account the following industry features:

The abundance of speculators who buy tokens solely for quick profit. This often leads to liquidity drain and a price drop after the token launch.
The ability to track on-chain activity of addresses to determine how interested a user is in cryptocurrency, which projects they have interacted with, etc. This helps to identify the most relevant target audience.
Thus, airdrops help avoid distributing tokens to “weak hands” and increase the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Moreover, this tool addresses the issue of a “cold start” and reduces the costs of attracting an initial audience.
Token distributions are also used when entering a competitive market through so-called “vampire attacks” — distributing assets among the opponent’s community to lure users away.
In 2020, the decentralized exchange SushiSwap conducted a vampire attack on its direct competitor, Uniswap. The service rewarded Uniswap liquidity providers with additional SUSHI tokens for locking their LP assets.
For users, the value of airdrops lies in the following aspects:
The opportunity to receive a conditionally free asset. Although airdrop hunters have to cover transaction fees and other operational costs, successful distribution allows them to obtain the token at a much lower price than most other market participants.
Community integration. Tokens often provide holders with certain privileges in using the product or voting rights, making them a part of the community.
Social and reputational capital. For some users, financial outcomes are secondary, but thanks to airdrops, they know that their contributions have not gone unnoticed.
Additionally, by interacting with projects during such campaigns, newcomers gain the opportunity to learn the basic principles of blockchain technology and better understand how various tools work.