Reality > Expectations

Does the word “e-beggar” mean anything to you?

In 2024, a crypto project called Starknet announced a multibillion-dollar $STRK airdrop.

Despite being one of the largest airdrops ever - this was considered the worst of all time.

Above is an apology tweet from a core dev from Starknet. The tweet is now deleted, but Abdel called his Starknet community “e-beggars” for being upset about their $STRK airdrop criteria/allocations.

This was the nuclear bomb that destroyed Starknet’s community and supporters.

While that tweet was the catalyst that destroyed Starknet’s community, the main reason can be condensed down into this formula:

Airdrops are a tool of scaled delight.

A successful airdrop is one where reality meaningfully exceeds expectations. Projects like Uniswap nailed it, Starknet did not.

By February 2024, many users who spent the last three years testing apps, minting .stark names, and “farming” activity believed they should qualify.

The actual criteria and allocations did not meet people’s expectations with most people straight up not qualifying whatsoever.

Whether or not Starknet wanted people to farm the chain is not important - what is important is how their community felt and how they were treated.

Airdrop criteria can make or break a project, it all depends on the expectations that you’ve set over the course of your pre-TGE campaign.

Ask yourself a couple of things:

I would add a third variable to the equation above:

Happiness = (Expectations - Reality) - Entitlement

Entitlement encompasses expectations but on a larger, cultural level.

Let’s go back to 2021:

Logged into Discord - you enter the #alpha-chat channel in your favorite NFT collection’s server.

Hundreds of messages are being sent every hour: each packed with excitement, FOMO, and the desire to find the next big win.

Nice! You just qualified for the $LOOKS airdrop for by trading NFTs on Opensea.

$10,000? Could’ve been better, doesn’t matter though - you’re already searching for the next guaranteed win.

During the NFT mania, free money was literally falling from the sky. You could retire your entire bloodline by grinding Discord for WL spots. Remember how that felt?

Fast forward back to today - we still see fragments of this grinding culture because it can still be “worth it” to grind Discord.

Look at Plasma - they just airdropped everyone in their Discord with the OG Role $20,000.

Since so many hundreds of millions of dollars have been airdropped to people with Discord roles, the assumption of the humble farmer is they are entitled to an airdrop from “earning” one.

The core problem with Discord roles is the criteria to earn one varies WILDLY from project to project, there is no playbook.

To make matters worse - there is an entire cabal of “airdrop callers” that spew slop on X all day long convincing their followers to grind in Discord to earn these allegedly valuable roles.

Despite roles being a good way to identify contributors, role based airdrop criteria tend to get a lot of FUD from the crypto community, why?

Airdrop roles are a spectrum with two extremes on it:

How do you know that every moderator that assigned each role is certain that the role holder has provided actual value?

Humans are inherently flawed - this is why social engineering will always be the most successful type of malware.

Moderators are typically young, unpaid labor from developing countries not familiar with the concept that people will manipulate, lie, cheat and steal in order to earn their favor and thus get a role.

And with AI advancing faster than any of us could possibly comprehend - the line between genuine contributor and alt-account AI slop gets thinner daily.

So what do we do? In my opinion, we return to fundamentals.

Cryptocurrency is inherently financial. It’s put up or shut up, glory goes to the ones with the conviction and capital to take big risks.

Instead of forming communities based on unquantifiable contributions, find a way to give your people skin in the game through ICOs, NFT sales, etc.

Turn conviction into your community’s leaderboard and wildly reward the people that believed in you from day one.

All of this to say - there is a lot of value in social contributions, but I do believe a lot of projects make the mistake of misvaluing social contributions thus misaligning expectations.

What is the equation for a successful community airdrop?

Happiness = (Expectations - Reality) - Entitlement.

How do you balance the value you provide to your community with the value they provide back to you? How do you delight the ones that truly believe in your vision, and make them as rich as possible?

Think about this the next time you use engage bot to assign points to people that raid a tweet.

Anyways, follow me on X dot com for more slop.