In the past couple of months, you might have noticed that teams have shifted away from gifting free money to farmers. To see tangible rewards now, you must follow the "skin in the game" route, being deep in the ecosystem before you are recognized.
We should move past the Arbitrum era generosity & understand our current reality: airdrops are not dead, but teams like MegaETH, Opinion Labs & Fluent are selectively prioritizing their distributions now, others are likely to follow suite just like they did with ICOs.
You can easily get farmed by a project while trying to farm them too but the best way to be part of a reward system now is usually to tailor a specific value proposition to these projects. Use your voice on X, onchain analytic skill, video content, your vibe coding skills or anything else to your advantage.
Approach the team & show them what you are building, even if it's a community for them, many are willing to provide resources. If you provide genuine value, you will almost certainly be eligible for airdrops. This is likely the playbook for Base, especially for developers (>builders code TX = Airdrop).
In a nutshell: airdrops are not dead, teams have simply started prioritizing their core contributors over generic farmers.
I donβt think airdrops are dead.
Maybe until teams start exploring different models around tokenization.
The ICO experiment failed and wasnβt much better than conducting an airdrop.
I still think more teams will continue to do airdrops.
The real mental gymnastics is figuring out what to commit your time to, as teams can farm you too.