What Are Airdrops And How To Capitalize From Them

What's up? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Today I'm going to talk to you about the concept of airdrops and how people are making a ton of money with them. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

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Welcome back. So I want to start off by talking a little bit about how I found out about airdrops in the first place. So a few months ago, I went to a website called ENS Ethereum Name Service, and I bought a domain name there. I bought a name called eflow Eth. E F L O W eth. And what that domain name does is it allows me to have a sort of short address for my crypto coin wallet for my wallet that I keep, you know, my Ethereum and all my various ERC20 tokens in. So in, instead of telling people to go to some long address with a whole bunch of letters and numbers in it, I can say, oh, just send me some Ethereum to eflow Eth. And when they type that into a wallet address to Send money to, it gets into my wallet. So I thought that was kind of a cool concept. So I bought the domain name eflow Eth. That's kind of my handle, my avatar that I use online. And a few months after I bought it. So I think I bought this thing for like 15 bucks, maybe, maybe 20 bucks after the ethereum gas fees. It was, you know, practically nothing about the same cost of a domain name on Namecheap or GoDaddy or something like that. And a few months after I bought it, I was browsing Twitter and I saw a tweet from somebody that said something to the effect of, man, if you bought some of that ENS names, if you bought like an ENS domain name, you're probably really happy right about now. And I was like, what is he talking about? I bought an ENS domain name a couple months ago. What's. What's that all about? So I started digging around and I looked into it a little bit, and so it turns out that if you had bought an ENS domain name, the company ENS Ethereum name service was doing an airdrop where basically you receive a whole bunch of their tokens for free as kind of a thank you for being an early tester of their product. So I ended up with roughly something like $7,000 worth of free cryptocurrency tokens overnight. And it was after buying a, you know, $15, $20 domain name several months earlier that I pretty much completely forgot about up until then. So I got that airdrop and I sold a small portion of, to some of the profits, and right now I still hold the rest. All right, so let's get into a little bit about what an airdrop actually is. So there's these things called daos. They're. They're basically decentralized organization where there's, you know, there's no kind of leader of the organization. The organization is governed by the token holders. And these daos will often distribute an allocation of tokens to people who were early adopters of their platform. It's kind of this like, thank you for believing in the project early on and being an early adopter. And so these tokens, they're typically, typically distributed to create governance. So basically they're going to give you voting rights on the direction of the dao. So typically, token holders get to cast a number of votes on new initiatives, and the amount of votes that they get is relative to the amount of tokens they hold. Therefore, those that have the biggest to gain, or, you know, the biggest to lose have the most power in the decision making of these daos. These governance tokens are distributed in sort of all sorts of ways. But airdrops recently have become one of the more popular and exciting ways to earn earn these coins. Because these airdrops essentially turn anybody who gets one of these airdrops into a marketing army of people who want to go and talk about and rave about this product. Hey, they just gave us some free tokens, which has real world value to us. And as a thank you, we're going to go spread the word for you. That's kind of the idea behind these airdrops. So let's talk about how to actually spot these potential airdrops. So to spot these, you want to look for projects that are in the web three space that don't have tokens yet. So there's new tools popping up every day that have utility in the space and a ton of them haven't launched a coin yet. So when you spot projects that have a cool utility in the Web3 space, there's some sort of like token element to it, but they don't have their own coin yet. These are good candidates for potential airdrops. So that begs the question, how do you get involved in these airdrops? Well, just use these tools, sign up for the various accounts with these various tools and play with the utility. If they have a token swap feature, try swapping some of your tokens. If they're a dashboard to view like a portfolio of balances, sync up your various wallets and mess around with the platform. Airdrops are essentially rewards for people that discover and believe in the platforms early. By the time the tokens drop, ideally, the existing users are going to be the most vocal supporters. It's instant marketing for them. So use the products, talk about them on Twitter and be an evangelist for the tools that you like. Now, there's been a lot of rumors about a lot of of other potential airdrops that are coming, right? There's a lot of tools out there. There's a lot of talk and there's a handful of tools that we've been kind of hearing more than others where people are going, you probably want to be using that tool pretty soon because there's a good chance there's an airdrop coming. And you know, we always kind of keep notes of those rumors and go and test some of these tools. And so I want to share with you some of these that are rumored. But before I do, I want to disclaim that there's no guarantees and this is not financial advice at all. So obviously do your own research beyond listening to this episode. These are just some of the cool tools that we've heard rumors that could do an airdrop in the future. So if you're comfortable with it, play with some of these tools, but don't invest what you can't afford to lose if an investment is required. You know, a lot of these airdrops, we actually don't know the criteria to get the airdrop. So the best idea to have the best potential for an airdrop is to kind of play with all the tools and all the features of the tools. Because some of the features might get you more tokens than others if there's a free tool to use, if you're just using the free features on it, you might be less likely to get an airdrop if there's paid features of the tool as well, the paid features are more likely to get you the airdrop than just using the free tools. I think that concept makes sense. So use these tools if they have paid functionality, you might want to invest a little bit of money and set aside a little bit of an allocation to put into some of these experimental things that could land you in airdrops in the future. But again, not financial advice. This is just something that we kind of play around with and experiment with. When we see new tools pop up that don't have tokens yet, we usually transfer a little bit of money into them if there's, you know, a need to transfer money into them. And we'll play around with these tools and just see what they do. And those are the types of things that could land you airdrops in the future. These are five of the ones that we've been kind of hearing the most buzz around. Again, who knows if they're actually going to airdrop or not. There's just been a lot of buzz around them. So the first one and probably the one that we most often is MetaMask. And MetaMask is sort of become the standard in this space for doing transactions with all sorts of tokens. Right. It's the browser based wallet that seems to be most in use by, by people in Web3 right now. And this wallet, we've been hearing all sorts of rumors that there is an airdrop in the future. So it could be a good thing to, if you don't have a MetaMask wallet yet, go get a free MetaMask wallet and start using it. But the biggest rumor is that you need to have used their swap feature. So they do have a feature where let's say you've got some sandbox token and you want to swap it for Ethereum token, you can use their swap functionality. Their swap functionality will actually look at all the various swap sites and try to get you the best price for your swap and actually optimize it for you. That swap feature is actually how Metamask makes their money. So when you use their swap, that's where they're making most of their income. So most likely in order to get the token, to get an airdrop, if there is an airdrop, most likely the way to get it is to use their swap features or, you know, any other paid features that you might see inside of MetaMask. But again, no one really knows what qualifies people for airdrops before they happen. Another big rumored one is zksync. Now what ZK Sync is, this is a layer two on top of Ethereum. So it basically helps bring down the gas fees for Ethereum. So you can create a wallet over at zksync and you can actually move money into that wallet. It does cost you sort of normal gas fees to move money into the Zksync wallet, but once you've moved money into this new wallet, you can actually transact with the Ethereum that's in it with much lower, if any, gas fees at all. I'm not sure, I can't remember if it's completely free gas fees when it's on zksync or if they're just very minimal, that they're, you know, a non issue. But to use Zksync you can, you should at least have a wallet, you can go set up a wallet there for free. I would recommend maybe putting a teeny tiny bit of Ethereum in there and actually transacting in the platform because again, where the money is going to be made for that dao is through the actual transactions. So you probably want to do some small transactions if you want to get it on the airdrop. But who knows, maybe just having a wallet will qualify you. It's worth it at the very least to just go and sign up and have a wallet at a place like that just in case the airdrop, they airdrop some coins to just the free users that have the wallet as well. You never know. Most likely they're going to reward the people that actually spend money with the platform through doing using their various features. That might cost some money, it might have some transaction fees. You're probably more likely to get the tokens by doing that. But you never know. We again don't know what the qualifications are to get these airdrops often. Alright, so the next one that we've been hearing rumors about but also is a tool that Joe and I really love and check in on every day is a platform called Zapper Fi Z a P P E R F I. Now ZapperFi is a dashboard for defi. So it rounds up all your various defi investments and then presents them in kind of a single easy to read dashboard. They also have quests in there and these quests are different things that you can do inside the platform that help you level up. When you log into zapperfy, you'll actually start out as like a level zero or a level one. I don't, I don't remember where they start you. And if you do some of the quests, things like check in every day consistently if you do any swaps, if you do any yield farming on their platform, if you use the various tools inside of their platform, you actually can. These qualify as quests and they help you level up inside of the zapper platform. But this platform is also really, really useful. You can use it kind of keep an eye on the whole defi portfolio they have. It gives you that 30,000 foot view of your entire portfolio. But it also has some really cool features where you can actually watch other people's wallets too. So if you, if you know the wallet address of an influencer or something like that, you can actually plug their wallet address in there and actually watch the transactions that happen. And if you want to follow various influencers, not a strategy I'd recommend, but if you did want to follow various influencers into projects, that'd be a way to see what, what projects influencers are jumping into. But it's a platform that we've really, really enjoyed using it. Joe and I check in on it each day for our individual portfolios and it's believed that there will be an airdrop and the amount of tokens that you might earn from this airdrop will probably be relative to the level you are on the platform because the higher the level you are on the platform, the more tools you've used on the platform, the deeper you've dove in into the platform and use the various functionality. So that's how you level up. So theoretically to get these airdrop people are speculating that you have to have a high level or the higher the level you are, the more tokens you stand to potentially earn. But it's really just a Cool platform. Go to Zapper Fi, you can connect your MetaMask wallet and it will sort of pull in all the data from any of the defi stuff that you might be doing. All right, so the last two that I want to talk to are actually additional domain name services. I mentioned in the beginning that I got this domain, this eth domain over @ Ethereum Name Service, they specialized in the ETH domains. But there are other domain name services that are building inside of the web3world. There's unstoppable domains and there's handshake.org both of these are web3 domain registries similar to ENS. And I can guarantee that they watch the success of the ENS airdrop. Now, whether they're going to follow suit and do the same thing on their own, that's yet to be seen. But Joe and I have been picking up domain names on both of those platforms just just in case. So that's unstoppable domains and handshake.org, you know, at the very least, we think it's, you know, a fairly good bet to go in and grab some of some various domains on both of these, whether they do an airdrop or not, who knows? But the value of these domains could just keep on going up and up and up over time. And, you know, you've got an asset in the domain as well. Some of these domain registries, I believe, unstoppable domains, you actually get a lifetime registry. So if you purchase a domain on unstoppable domains, it's not like it renews every one year, or you have to set it to renew every 10 years or anything like that. You just own that domain forever. It's an NFT that you now own forever. And if anybody wants that domain name from here on out, they have.

To buy it off of.

You. It doesn't, you know, expire, and somebody could scoop it up right after it expires or anything like that. These are forever domains locked onto the blockchain. Now, ENS is not like that. Unstoppable domains is. So they have a big play that they're trying to do into the web3 space. Same with handshake.org so owning domains on those platforms could be very beneficial. You may get airdrops out of them, you may not. But either way, owning some of these domains could end up being a decent asset to own. I mean, if you can get a really, really sweet, short domain name back in the early 90s and grab the.com of a, you know, a very short brandable name, you would be sitting on some pretty valuable domains right now. Well, there's another opportunity with that as well. So airdrop or not, these are probably some decent assets that we're kind of looking at, invest in and just holding on to some domain names for the future, regardless of the airdrops. So not financial advice. I can't disclaim that enough. Just kind of telling you some of the stuff we're playing with. Whether it'll pan out and be really successful for us or not, we don't know yet. Just kind of keeping you guys in the loop there. So those are the five that are the ones that we hear the most rumors about. So just to recap, that was Metamask. The rumor is you got to use their Swap feature. There's ZK Sync. You can set up a layer 2 wallet on ZK Sync. Rumor is you should probably transfer some money into that wallet and transact using that wallet a little bit. Zapper Fi is the third one. Log in, connect your wallet to let it do its thing and calculate everything that you're doing in Defi and what assets you have sitting in your wallet. But also follow the quest. They make it real simple to follow the quests and level up. So if you start attempting to level up on there, there's a, you know, there's chance there's an airdrop in the future. And then the last two unstoppable domains and handshake.org just like the ENS airdrop, those are places that you can buy domain names. They're building it in a decentralized fashion and they're actually minting these domain names as NFTs. So really cool stuff. Check those out. And yeah, that's, that's about all I got on the the airdrop topic. When we come across other good candidates, we often like to share them over in our discord. So if you head over to hustleandflowchart.com Discord you can join in on the convers. So if you're not in there, definitely jump over and join the conversation. Because when we stumble across things that we go, ooh, this could have an airdrop in the future, or this project looks kind of exciting, or this is something that looks like it could be really big in the future. We're pointing that out in the Discord first. So if you're not over there, hustleandflowchart.com Discord also, follow me on Twitter. I am Mattrwolf with an e at the end. M A T T R W O L F E on Twitter Joe Fear is Joe Fear J O E F I E R Follow us both on Twitter. We curate a lot of am amazing tweets. A lot of these tweets are things that tend to point us to the projects that we're looking at. So if you want to see some of the genesis of some of the projects we're excited about, we usually spot a lot of them on Twitter. When we do spot them on Twitter, we like to retweet and share them and mention them a little bit. So Twitter and Discord. If you're hanging out in those two places, you're probably having your eyes open to a whole new world right about now and a whole new way of thinking about all this stuff. If you're not hanging out in those two places with us, come hang out. Keep the conversation going. That's hustleandflowchart.com Discord Matt Ourwolf and Joe Fear on Twitter. Come hang out. It's a lot of good conversations, hopefully eye opening conversations. And one final note before I wrap this episode up. Joe and I, we have not missed releasing a single episode in five years. Now, we started in January 2017 and we've never missed a single date of releasing an episode twice per week. For years. We've dropped a new show every, every single day without missing it, or every single Tuesday and Thursday without missing a single day. So in January, January of 2022, next month, as of this recording, we're going to take a one month hiatus on releasing new episodes. This is going to be the first time in five years. So the month of January 2022, we're not going to be releasing new episodes during that one month. But don't leave us. We're not going anywhere. We're just restructuring a few things in our business. We have some really, really exciting new projects that we've been working on that we're excited to share with you. We have some amaz amazing guests that are going to blow your mind that we're bringing on the show next year. So make sure you stick around, don't unsubscribe or anything. We've got some really, really amazing stuff that we're working on. We just need that little bit of a gap. We just need that single month of downtime to properly lay the new foundation for what we're going to bring to you guys. It's going to be really, really exciting. We're hoping to open your eyes to all sorts of exciting stuff starting next year where we're turning this corner and where we think the biggest opportunities, the biggest wealth transfer in history is literally coming over the next 12 to 18 months. And we couldn't be more excited. And we're getting involved on a deeper and deeper level in this Web3 space. And we, we've got some exciting projects that we will be unveiling. We just need a single month off. Hopefully you don't miss us too much during the January month that we're off, but we are coming back. So if you just notice that there's no episodes for four, that's a planned hiatus. That's a planned break. We're building some cool stuff for you that you're really, really gonna dig. We'll be back with new shows starting in February. So just watch this space. We have two more episodes left this year. We'll be taking those four weeks off and then we'll be right back in your ears to unveil all the exciting new stuff that we've been working on. So thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you in the next couple episodes this year and again, come hang out in the Discord. Follow us on Twitter if you like this. Leave us a review on wherever you're listening to this. It' much appreciated. Thank you very much. Talk to you in the next.

One. Hey, hey, hey. Thank you for listening to that episode. This is Joe Fear. I'm sure you probably already knew that, and Matt is not here right now, but I'm pretty sure he enjoyed the episode just as much as you and I did because, you know, he went into the production of kind of making that thing right along with me. So thank you very much and I want to give a quick shout out to our buddies over at Easy Webinar. These guys have been supporting us for a while, a long time, and Casey Zieman is just a super good guy all around. He's actually been on the show before. He's the founder of EZ Webinars. So if you look up Casey Zeman on any podcast platform you're listening to, go check him out. Go check out his backstory, what he's all about. You can learn a lot about webinars as well. And right now, Easy Webinar, these guys are actually hooking you up with a great trial. It's a completely free trial to test out their software, Soup to Nuts. Check it all out and see if it's a good fit for you. If you go to easywebinar.com hustle that's H U S T L E If you didn't know how to spell Hustle, there you go. So if you go to easywebinar.com hustle you can go grab a free trial and EZ webinar literally lives up to its name. It's super simple. I mean super easy. And it does all the stuff that you're looking for in any kind of thing with webinars. I mean, they literally cover every single type of webinar you possibly can do. So from live to automated to scheduled at specific times and all these crazy features in between, can't even list them all out. I'll be here way too long. They give you a ton of advanced analytics. What's working, what's not. During your webinar, based off all these actions, you'll see who attended, how long they stayed, if they clicked the offer or if they didn't. Basically, you're going to make more money and you're going to work less with this thing and you're going to create better relationships with the folks that are listening. That's a good experience. You want to give that good experience along with some great content, of course, and a killer offer if that's what you got for them. So go try it out yourself. Go check out easywebinar.com hustle that's easywebinar.com hustole. Alrighty. Alrighty. So that is the end of this episode. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, enjoying it. Hopefully you did. I'm pretty sure you did if you lasted this long. And go check out Easy Webinar when you get the chance and we will talk about to you next time. Bye.

Bye.

Sam.