Earning free cryptos: Faucets, Bounties, and Airdrops
There is nothing like a free meal, but there is a thing as ‘Earn free crypto’, albeit with the right know-how.
Faucets: It is a cryptocurrency award system in which apps or websites give out small amounts of cryptocurrencies for completing a few easy tasks, such as viewing videos or clicking on ads or sharing content or completing captcha tasks, or completing tutorials and attempting quizzes on their apps or websites. However, the reward amount is really small and in fact, that is precisely why these are called faucets. It is like collecting water dripping, a drop at a time, from a leaking faucet…you have to really be patient with these. One needs to be at it, consistently for weeks or even a couple of months. To accumulate good enough amounts as most faucets give out small tiny rewards at regular intervals which are often staggered over a day to ensure that you keep coming back.
The process is simple. One needs to first register on a faucet and share one’s wallet address. Then as and when one performs the tasks on the website, the stipulated reward amount is sent to one’s micro wallets. Since these reward amounts are really small, one needs special wallets that can collect such a small amount of cryptos (these are usually created automatically upon signing up for a faucet) and once the micro wallet fills up, the amount gets shifted to one’s main crypto wallet.
Bitcoin faucets, the very first of which was developed back in 2010, are some of the most popular ones. Although when it started off, it used to reward 5 whole Bitcoins to each user, today one can earn Satoshis (which is one-millionth of one Bitcoin and its smallest unit) by performing stipulated tasks. This amount is sent directly to your bitcoin wallet (hence you need to set up a well-optimized and secured Bitcoin wallet before you venture into this) or one can also use third-party micropayment wallets like FaucetHub or CoinPot.
Apart from bitcoin, there are faucets for Ethereum (rewards in Ether), Tron (rewards in TRX tokens), Litecoin (rewards in LTC tokens), and Monero (rewards in XMR tokens), etc as well.
Some of the popular faucets today are Cointiply, Fire Faucet, FreeBitcoin, BonusBitcoin, SatoshiLabs, Allcoins.pw, FreeBitcoins, Coinpayu, FaucetCrypto, Bitcoin Aliens, Bitcoin Zebra, Express faucet, etc.
However, it is a zone susceptible to scams. Hence while opting for a faucet, it is advisable to check the following apart from the security, stability, and reputation of the faucet:
- How many Satoshis one can get per claim?
- How long does one need to wait between two claims?
- What is the minimum withdrawal balance?
- Whether the payments are done directly or does one need to access a micropayment wallet?
Bounties: These are short-term tasks, mostly promotional activities during an initial coin offering (ICO, which is the crypto world equivalent to an equivalent to an initial public offering or IPO), such as creating graphics, finding bugs, writing content, etc. offered by blockchain or token developers for a particular project in exchange of a particular reward amount, which are either in cash or a percentage of the tokens of the project. One can encash these tokens and get fiat currencies once these are enlisted on an exchange.
This is an easy and cost-effective way to spread the word about the ICO and the resource saved can be utilized in developing software. Bounties are doled out in two stages, Pre-ICO and Post-ICO. In the first stage, the focus is on marketing and promoting the project or offering to prospective investors and this is mostly done on the social media platforms such as Reddit, Bitcointalk, Telegram, Facebook, and Twitter. These bounties are mostly aimed at influencers, marketers and bloggers as well as computer programmers. During the setting up of the Ethereum blockchain, a number of such bounties were offered to external developers. The Post-ICO bounties on the other hand are more about fine-tuning the process by getting design feedback and finding bugs. Hence these bounties are mostly offered to coders who can detect the problem areas. It works in a similar manner to how gamers are often given rewards to find bugs or test a new game. Apple had announced a bounty of up to $200,000 to hackers in 2016 to find bugs on their products. Companies like Intel, Yahoo, Snapchat, Google, Meta, Cisco, etc are also known for offering bug bounties. Post-ICO bounties are also aimed at people who can translate the documents, including white papers, required for global marketing aimed at non-English speaking crypto-audience.
Some of the popular platforms offering bounties are Intel, Yahoo, Snapchat, Starbucks, Mozilla, Vimeo, Twitter, Avast, Paypal, Apache, Apple, etc.
Airdrops: This is a way to acquire cryptos by mostly doing nothing! It is as free as gets! Companies transfer free digital assets to the wallets of multiple users. Airdrops are marketing strategies used mostly by start-ups to promote a new token or blockchain project. These first became popular way back in 2017 during the ICO boom. Companies give away tokens in order to grab eyeballs and create a buzz and initial traction among prospective investors. Also, this ensures the tokens have a higher number of holders and this helps in the metrics and creates a user base even before the projects/tokens gets listed on the exchange.
These tokens are mostly sent directly to the e-wallets of the recipient, in some cases one needs to claim these manually and the users are required to perform a few promotional tasks. The latter is however more of a bounty project.
In the case of a standard airdrop, one needs to create an account with the new project, provide wallet details and wait for the airdrop. In exclusive airdrops, the users are usually selected based on certain criteria such as the minimum amount of coins you are holding in your wallet (or wallet balance) or if you were one of the early adopters and have been regularly interacting with the platform, or you are an active user of the blockchain community. Most airdrops happen on Bitcoin, Etherium or Binance Smart Chain wallets as these enjoy a large uses base. In 2016, Stellar Lumens (XLM) had airdropped 3 billion XLM exclusively to users on the Bitcoin network. In 2020, Uniswap had airdropped 400 UNI to the wallets of all early adopters who had interacted with the protocol of the decentralized exchange before a certain cut-off date.
OpenDAO’s 2021 Christmas Day airdrop, SOS, saw about 300,000 wallets claims by January 12. Although the project is not affiliated with Opensea (the biggest NFT marketplace), the airdrops were given to people who had made transactions on the NFT marketplace — the bigger the spending amount the bigger the airdrop of SOS tokens!
To find these projects can do the following:
- Follow airdrop aggregators
- Sign up on the new platforms that might offer standard airdrops,
- Monitor new projects for bounties.
- Keep an eye on the upcoming airdrop opportunities by checking social media handles and being on crypto-related forums and news portals
However, in case the airdrop is of newly- launched tokens, there is no guarantee how they will fare in the market — some might appreciate fast while some might eventually amount to nothing. Airdrops can also be of governance tokens, which give the holders the voting power decisions related to the project’s future development. Many companies are now opting for NFTs as airdrops.
Even though one can never be sure of the future of the project or the tokens, collecting airdrops is a good starting point to learn the functioning of the crypto world, how to use wallets, exchanges, transfer keys, and the likes, and you are not losing anything unless you land yourself in a scam!
