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Stack Signalhttps://paragraph.com/@stacksignal The proven playbook for AI-overwhelmed crypto natives to build portable systems that automate the work they hate.Sun, 19 Jul 2026 02:15:44 GMThttps://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.htmlhttps://github.com/jpmonette/feedenStack Signalhttps://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus\_images/21425dc19933e3b2584c5f6d65bf63ecdadff46b39800fcedd664cd5d29a8379.jpghttps://paragraph.com/@stacksignal
All rights reserved<![CDATA[You’re stuck in the AI cost war (this is the only way to escape)]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/youre-stuck-in-the-ai-cost-war-this-is-the-only-way-to-escape hZua4ZObyyo9lwYRUW1sFri, 01 May 2026 01:01:32 GMTRate limits have become the greatest enemy of any AI user. Model providers are no longer as generous as before, and we are at the losing end.
The AI cost war is just getting started, and inference will no longer be as cheap as it currently is right now.
I’m facing this constant struggle of managing my usage very carefully to avoid being rate-limited, and it has been a pain (and somewhat stressful experience).
Those who constantly hit rate limits will be those who are in a constant loop of asking AI a question and it executes, which burns too many tokens.
Meanwhile, the ones who survive are those who know how to spend their tokens wisely. Instead of prompting simply every time, they build out repeatable workflows that have clear instructions for any model to execute.
With models now being a commodity (so many are good now), the only key differentiating factor becomes the workflow and instructions that you give AI to execute.
And today, I’ll be showing you that key component you need in your system to escape this cost war:
Models will only get more expensive from here
Vibe coding used to be fun. AI used to be accessible to anyone who subscribed to a Coding Plan.
We saw posts about how someone can vibe code a cool tool that helps them with their workflows, and I remembered no one complaining about the rate limits.
A few months back, I knew nothing about this term. I never worried about them because it seemed like I would never hit them with my paid subscriptions.
I just kept prompting simple requests and asking AI to make simple changes to my vibe-coded projects (which was the completely wrong way to do it).
But it’s not the same now. If I were to do the same actions, I’d likely hit my rate limits with just a few requests (when I could have made the edits directly via a code editor).
Models used to be cheap because model providers wanted to acquire more users. They cut costs and give usage limit promotions to lock you in with their annual plans. Most are not profitable, and that has to change.
Right now, most of our costs are still being subsidised by the VCs. But it’s only a matter of time before model providers are forced to make profits (they’d want a return on their investment).
And that’s when AI will no longer be for everyone. We start to face the real costs we incur when using AI, which are exponentially higher than the costs we have right now.
A simple chat with the AI will use 20% of your weekly limit. Soon, AI will only be accessible to those who can afford the higher-tier subscriptions.
While everyone else is left with the scraps of poor rate limits or low-tier models.
Rate limits get hit more easily, and providers decide to cancel third-party/agent integrations when it becomes too expensive to run them with a coding plan.
The $10/month Coding Plans will be pitiful, and we barely get any usage out of them. Or, they could just be like Z.AI and increase their subscription plan costs without informing anyone.
And those who use AI as a simple chatbot without building anything repeatable will be stuck in this cost war.
Most people are too focused on the models
Every now and then, a new model will launch with all the hype and engagement farming on the timeline, just like Opus 4.7.
Most talked about the benchmarks that they exceeded every other model.
But does that matter to you?
The ‘best’ model may not always perform the task in the way that you like or expect. In other cases, a ‘lower-tier’ model could give you the same output at a lower cost.
The ‘best’ model today won’t be the same tomorrow, since everything changes so quickly in AI.
Maybe it’s because I’m using AI differently from what others are used to.
I’ve stopped vibe-coding extensively, unless there’s something that I’d believe is truly useful to myself (like FreeTierModels).
Instead, I’m using AI to automate tasks that I hate doing myself. The soul-sucking, repetitive actions that I do every day can be offloaded to AI.
So instead of stressing over what model you should use, I’m focusing on building this instead:
You need to build a Portable AI System
I’ve been obsessed with building a system that lets me easily switch between any model or subscription, while still getting good outputs.
Everything needs to be modular and flexible enough so all of my data remains truly mine, while the model is just the executor that automates the workflow for you.
These are the 8 PORTABLE components of my system:
Personalised context: A file system that includes your context and tasks so any model knows who you are, what you do, and how you think
Owning your keys: A BYOK provider that lets you easily switch between models, even within the same chat window
Requests: Your input (voice or text) that gives commands so the AI runs tasks for you
Thought processor: The LLM acts as the brain that receives an input and provides an output
Actionable workflows: Skills that are repeatable and can be invoked by any LLM
Building capabilities: Tools like MCPs or APIs that increase the capabilities of your system to external platforms
Link across devices: Syncing across multiple devices
Edit and manage: Using a markdown editor to write anything in your system
Any of the external components (like the models) can be switched out and the system still works.
We are not locked in with one provider, while still having access to all of our data (instead of having to export it).
And the only way for the entire system to work with any model is through repeatable workflows:
Skills let you Build Once, Switch Anytime
Systems thinking is something that I didn’t care much about. But the more I looked at how any business runs, everything has an SOP.
Someone like McDonald’s, which I quote this idea that Ali Abdaal makes in his videos:
McDonald’s has built systems so easy and repeatable that they can replicate across any outlet.
Any employee can be hired, and they can immediately start contributing to the system because of the clear workflows and SOPs that have been built.
And it’s not just McDonald’s, any food outlet is the same:
Someone takes orders
Orders are passed to the kitchen
The kitchen prepares the food and passes to the server
The server gives the food to the customer
Everyone has well-defined roles and workflows with clear instructions on how to execute the tasks they are expected to.
We can build our AI system in the same way.
Our employees (models) can be switched at any time, while we get the same output because we gave them clear instructions on how to execute the task, regardless of the model we choose.
If you’d heard of Claude Skills before, these are repeatable SOPs written in .md files that tell Claude how to execute anything to get an output that you want.
In my current AI system, I’ve added 190 different Agent Skills (it’s not just limited to Claude) to automate all of the tasks in my daily life.
Some are ones that I built, others I’ve downloaded or adapted from skill repositories online, and these let me carry out certain actions like:
Converting my long-form article into an HTML file that can be easily repurposed into Substack, Medium, and LinkedIn
Fetching an onchain summary from DeBank from the wallets that I track
Syncing between my lead magnets and email platform
Generating colour palettes for different sites and my own brand
Adding YouTube transcripts and summaries into my knowledge base
Converting different files to markdown for easy reading by AI
Full workflows that keep track of all of my articles and YouTube video scripts
These are just some of my examples, but there are many others that you can add to your own workflows.
But I’m not going to bore you with the technicalities of how a Skill works. What’s more important is using the right steps to build out a Skill that you can use with any model:
The framework to build effective Skills
You may be wondering, why even bother with learning how to build Skills?
There are so many repositories out there with Skills for almost any use case.
But what works for someone else may not necessarily work for you, because everyone’s workflows will be different.
And there’s a risk of prompt injection attacks when installing someone else’s public Skill, so I’d adapt my workflow from them but never copy it directly.
You have a unique way of carrying out a certain task to get to an output, so there’s no point in copying someone else’s workflow.
While it seems daunting to write out a SKILL.md file, it’s not that hard. You just need to run the entire workflow together with AI, and work on solving the problem together.
There’s no need to write out the entire SOP (which I hate doing). Once you get a ‘gold standard’ run that gets the output that you want, the LLM will write out the full spec while taking note of what they should avoid (through bad runs).
So there’s no coding involved either.
I’ve developed a SIGNAL framework that I use whenever building a new Skill, and here’s how you can use it too:
(I’ll be using examples from a recent Skill that I built with this framework):
- Spot the bottleneck
Instead of building out your entire system from day one, let’s start small and find one annoying problem to solve first.
Throughout your entire life, there are many tasks that are extremely repetitive and soul-sucking, and you just wish there were a way to complete them much faster.
This is exactly how AI can help you automate your workflow: you only need to give AI a command, and it executes the entire workflow for you.
First, spend some time trying to identify that annoying problem you have. What is something you wish you didn’t need to do every single day?
It doesn’t matter how small it is, it just needs to be something that you hate doing.
That gives you more motivation to find a way to solve that bottleneck.
It can be as simple as connecting a new provider to OpenCode. I didn’t want to constantly:
Go back to their documentation
Find the right page and give it to the AI to execute it
So I built out a Skill to lay out exactly how I want this action to be done (just like all of my other OpenCode skills).
If it’s something that you do repeatedly, it can be converted into a Skill.
And this saves so much time because you can just invoke it with a slash command.
Frame your problem by describing exactly what you want to achieve, and what bottleneck you face.
The more details you give the AI, the better it can understand your problem and suggest a solution.
I’d suggest using a voice transcription tool (I’m using Letterly ) to describe your problem via speaking instead of typing.
Here’s a recent example of mine when building out a Skill:
- Integrate the stack
After telling AI what the problem is, and if you give enough details to it, the AI should come up with a comprehensive plan on how to automate that workflow for you.
Some skills don’t require complex tools. They can just exist as a simple SKILL.md file with written text on what to execute.
Others will require connecting to APIs or MCPs (if you’re using external platforms), or Python scripts to execute tasks (like getting all of the recent tweets I posted via Typefully).
Depending on what platform you use, the LLM will recommend a way to connect with them so you can carry out the task.

That’s why Skills are more versatile than prompts that just give you text-based outputs.
- Guide the LLM
I saw a recent Reddit post that complained about how confused an intern was when executing tasks that the OP instructed him to do.
A similar concept can be applied to AI:
They are just an execution tool, and if you don’t define your instructions clearly:
They’ll come up with extremely poor outputs.
Ones that you don’t expect because you didn’t guide them enough.
So we have to walk through the entire workflow with AI step by step. We can’t expect it to know what we want, especially if we don’t articulate it clearly enough.
That’s why after framing the problem, I’d always want to run the entire workflow once to see how the AI understands and executes the task.
It will never be perfect during the first pass, and the only way to build the Skill is through failing repeatedly:
- Nail the standard
I can guarantee that the AI will make mistakes when running through the workflow.
I’ve experienced it so many times, but it’s actually good that they make the errors now.
By telling it what went wrong and what it shouldn’t do, it has more context on the wrong executions and what to avoid.
That’s why I like failures at the start:
We get to iterate on the workflow together with AI and get it to clarify anything that they’re still unsure (which could be something we didn’t think of too).
Constant iteration is the only way to build a good Skill. It’s tedious, but once you get the ‘gold standard’ that gives you the output you want:
It’s finally time to turn it into a Skill.
- Automate the logic
This is probably the easiest step, after getting the output that you want.
Claude has a skill-creator Skill that outlines exactly how a Skill should be created and how to reduce the token burn through progressive disclosure.
There’s no need to understand how it all works.
Once you get a successful run, tell the AI to convert the entire session into a Skill, including all of the mistakes made and bad runs with the skill-creator Skill.
While this Skill is focused on creating Skills inside the .claude folder, it’s also applicable to any Agent Skill. All of my Skills are in the .agents folder to be invokable by OpenCode, and they were all created by the same skill-creator Skill.
It has rich context on what worked and what didn’t, so the Skill becomes more personalised and specific with a higher success rate.
I’d also be more conscious about naming my Skills. When I want to search for them inside my .agents folder, it’s easier to find them if I organise by their domains, including:
core-*learnings-*article-*
This is entirely optional, and you can choose to name your skills however you like.
But that’s not the end of the entire Skill creation process:
- Loop recursively
Whenever we run a Skill, there’s likely a new problem or output expectation that we have.
Sometimes it could be as simple as changing the file directory.
Skills are not static, and they will constantly evolve.
So whenever there’s something wrong or new when you execute them, just ask the AI to update the Skill to fit the new workflow.
Consistently iterate on the Skill until it gets the outputs that you want.
Exit the AI cost war with Skills
Skills let you be truly portable with your AI system:
They are clear SOPs and instructions given to any model that can execute them and get similar results.
And you won’t get locked in with any provider because you built the Skill once that can be repeated at any time with any model.
Of course, that’s not always the case, especially when asking the LLM to write good content (that doesn’t sound like AI slop).
The more expensive models may produce better outputs, but for other workflows that have been converted into reusable scripts, AI is just there to execute them.
So it’s possible to use a cheap model like GLM 4.7-Flash, and you’d still get the same results.
To start building out your own Skills, I’ve included both my SIGNAL Skill framework and the skill-creator Skill inside this repo.
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[The simplest way to start using AI effectively (without paying for premium models) ]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/the-simplest-way-to-start-using-ai-effectively-without-paying-for-premium-models 8tsgnD83W69gBJ8by0g4Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:03:00 GMTYou don’t need OpenClaw or Hermes to get good with AI.
Everyone on the timeline makes you feel inadequate by flexing the crazy workflows that earned them 6 figures with agents.
But for most people, this is too complicated.
The fastest way to get good with AI is to start with a free setup that helps you understand how to integrate AI into your workflow.
AI Twitter is showing you how amazing the latest models are and the high-quality outputs that it produces.
Instead of being overwhelmed by fear and analysis paralysis, it’s time to start taking action.
I’ve been searching for the easiest and simplest setup that anyone, even complete beginners with no coding experience, can build and start using AI more effectively.
And I finally found the perfect combination that achieves this:
The Claude Code + Obsidian system, but with any model provider
Before I built out my Hermes and OpenClaw agents, I started out with a Claude Code + Obsidian setup inspired by @ttorres and @carlvellotti’s YouTube videos.
I call it my Signal OS, a personal operating system that compounds my social and onchain workflows while saving me time on soul-sucking tasks.
Back then, I had the misconception that Claude Code was only for coding.
But I finally understood that it can be used for almost anything, once you create a repeatable workflow that the LLM can execute (or Skills).
I enjoyed this setup because I could create Agent Skills to perform tasks for me with Claude Code, while I do all of my writing in Obsidian.
This system knows who I am, what I do, and how I think because of all the context within markdown files that the LLM can access.
Which lets the LLM give more personalised outputs, rather than an unreliable memory system that is found in the chatbox.
Even then, Claude Code may not be for everyone.
The subscription’s pricing can be expensive to some, especially when they change their rate limits at any time.
This started a couple of weeks ago with a carrot, 2x the rate limits at off peak times
Then today it was announced that they are reducing limits at peak times
If you are using Claude code between 1pm-7pm GMT you'll hit the 5hr limit more quickly. Weekly limits are unchanged
There are other LLMs that provide comparable quality of outputs while at a much cheaper price with higher rate limits, and I’ve been exploring the most cost-effective setup for my own needs.
That’s when I realised that I can’t rely on Claude Code alone:
You need an Open System
You don’t want to be locked into any ecosystem, not even Anthropic’s.
Imagine some other company releases a new model that outperforms Opus/Sonnet/Haiku, and you can’t bear to switch over because you bought an annual plan.
Things move too fast in this space, and our operating system should not be stuck with one provider.
We need to freely switch between models, depending on what best fits our needs, while getting the same high-quality outputs that we expect.
This all boils down to creating high-quality Skills that are clear, repeatable workflows that any LLM can pick up and execute right away.
I’ve tried switching between models inside the Claude Code extension as I felt that it’s the most beginner-friendly way for anyone to get started.
While it had some success when I switched over to my GLM-4.7 subscription, I faced errors like this when using OpenRouter’s API key.
So I couldn’t recommend this system yet because it wasn’t ‘open enough’, until I finally found the best setup:
The OpenCode-OpenRouter combination
One of the biggest gripes I had with OpenClaw and Hermes was when I needed to switch models.
When my subscription hit the rate limit for the week, I had to change the model provider within the .json file.
But this led to (a lot) of troubleshooting and testing to ensure that the connection works. It usually doesn’t on the first try, and I burned lots of tokens just trying to get everything working.
I tried switching models in Claude Code and Codex to use another Anthropic/OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and these led to many errors too.
So after playing with more CLIs and applications, these are the only 2 platforms that I’d recommend for complete beginners who want to start for free:
OpenCode to access any API
I like OpenCode because it lets me connect to any provider that I currently have a subscription with, including:
ZAI Coding Plan Lite
Alibaba Coding Plan Lite
@MiniMax_AI API
A bunch of free-tier subscriptions
For OpenClaw and Hermes, I had to verify the Base URL (it’ll be different for the coding and API plans), and I wasted a lot of time troubleshooting to ensure that everything works well.
While for OpenCode, most of the popular model plans (both from the providers themselves or aggregators) are already preconfigured, and we just need to add the API key inside.
I’ve been using the CLI first, until I realised that OpenCode has a desktop app too, which makes it even more accessible to beginners who don’t want to use the Terminal.
I can switch between models that I’ve configured for each subscription, while each individual chat allows me to select a specific model (so I can route requests for each specific task).
In my case, I’m using MiniMax-M2.7 to build out the article outlines (like this one) with me as it requires more thinking capabilities, while I use Step 3.5 Flash to review my article with a checklist (after writing everything out).
It gets even better when you pair it with a platform that offers free inference:
OpenRouter to access free models
I chose OpenRouter as the main choice to route my requests to free models because:
It has > 28 models in their free list (though I face issues when connecting to some)
The setup is straightforward when generating an API key
We get free 50 requests a day
OpenRouter even has Tier 2 models (a similar tier as Claude Sonnet) that you can access for free, including Nemotron Super.
Though you’ll be sharing data with them if you choose the free tier.
While 50 requests per day is a great way for any beginner to start building out their Signal OS, we can bump it up to 1,000 requests a day with a one-time deposit of $10.50 ($10 credit top-up + 5% fees).
I’ve been using the free tier extensively to carry out most of my execution tasks, and I haven’t hit 1,000 requests a day (yet).
So I believe that this is generous enough to try out this new way of building out your personal operating system.
But of course, these models are not good enough to code out anything. I would still use a paid subscription if I want to vibe code or create Skills, while I use the free models to execute tasks that I’ve already created comprehensive workflows for.
I shared more on how to get access to these free models here .
You just need a system that works for you
The Simplest AI Setup lets you experiment with AI in a smarter way through better context engineering.
Most memory systems in the chatboxes have a limit to how much they know about you, until they start replacing old memories with new ones.
And they will forget some of the tasks that you asked the LLM to do before.
But if you design your system in the right way, the LLM will never forget who you are, what you do, and how you think.
All it takes is building out a markdown-based system that routes the right context to the right request.
So if you want to use AI the right way instead of a generic chatbox that forgets everything, get the full (free) video guide to build your Simplest AI Setup.
I will guide you through the entire installation process and model setup for both OpenCode and OpenRouter, while giving you the full prompt to build your Signal OS.
Get the free guide here .
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[I tested every agentic wallet option, only one actually worked (with a catch)]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/i-tested-every-agentic-wallet-option-only-one-actually-worked-with-a-catch gDG892RIasiPb8oaif4JWed, 25 Mar 2026 16:23:14 GMTYou’ll never build a safe DeFi agent with a plaintext private key.
Anyone who can access your file will have full control over your agentic wallet.
So what’s the best way to give a wallet to your agent?
This stumped me for weeks as I tried and failed to find the right wallet that worked for me.
There were so many options, yet some:
weren’t secure enough
locked into certain ecosystems
did not have enough network support
But I think I’ve finally found the answer (though it’s still not the perfect solution yet).
Many agentic wallets just didn’t work
These were all of the options that I considered:
- Storing a private key in plaintext
While it’s convenient to store a private key in plaintext, it’s the easiest way to get hacked.
Anyone who accesses your computer or VPS will have full access to your private key and the funds in your agent’s wallet.
A private key is worse than an API key because while those can be rotated at any time, a private key is lost forever once it gets exposed.
@PatrickAlphaC has been tweeting against storing private keys in plaintext and it’s way too risky to leave your private keys exposed in this way.
- Storing a private key in Foundry
Patrick recommended to uss Foundry to generate and encrypt a private key, and I tried doing that on my VPS.
But then, I realised how this is not feasible after chatting with my agent:
There still needs to be a manual step for me to decrypt the transactions, so the agent still needs access to the private key for it to run autonomously.
It suggested me to store the private key in plaintext, which is not what I want.
I tried asking Grok for other alternatives, and it suggested using Account Abstraction which seemed to complex for me.
And I’ll likely burn through tons of tokens just to troubleshoot and get everything right.
But maybe I’m doing it wrong, and there’s a way to use Foundry with agents where they can sign autonomously without my approval.
- Agentic Wallets
While I was searching for an Agentic Wallet, I found a few options:
Coinbase
Privy
OKX
@wallet just launched their Agentic Wallet a few days ago, and I found it most ideal since it supports multiple chains.
While Coinbase launched theirs a while back, I don’t have enough details on what networks they support (though it seems like it’s just Base).
and when I wanted to send funds from my Coinbase Agentic Wallet, it was only possible for USDC.
For other tokens, I had to use the developer portal which defeats the purpose of an agentic wallet.
While the OKX Agentic Wallet supports more chains and functions, I couldn’t get it to work with other platforms like @lifiprotocol.
Doing something as simple as bridging ETH from Base to Ethereum was such a pain because there was no route with the OKX skills, and LiFi couldn’t work.
But this wallet seems to be the best fit for my needs right now:
OWS wallets are the most secure for now
@OpenWallet’s Open Wallet Standard (OWS) appealed to me because it:
doesn’t leave private keys in plaintext
acts like a full private key except that it’s encrypted
supports all EVM chains and other L1s (Solana etc.)
OWS is a unified local storage format to create, sign, and manage wallets securely across every tool and chain.
Start: openwallet.sh
Docs: docs.openwallet.sh
Github: github.com/open-wallet-st…
I tried generating a wallet on my Hetzner-Hermes setup, and it didn’t work at first.
So I just asked Hermes how to do it, and it helped to create my wallet from there.
It’s possible to do it manually, you could throw the error into ChatGPT and tell it that the binary isn’t in your path.
The CLI generated all of the wallet addresses for me, while I didn’t have access to the private keys.
But what I realised was how easy it is to export out the seed phrase, once someone has access to my VPS.
We just needed the wallet export command, and the entire 12-word phrase gets exposed immediately.
Don’t worry, I’ve deleted that wallet already.
I did see the docs mention adding a passphrase, but I wasn’t prompted for it during the wallet creation process (and that’s something I’d like to clarify with the @moonpay team as well).
I did try encrypting the wallet and generating our passphrase with Claude,
but that failed and I couldn’t decrypt the wallet even after typing the right passphrase.
For now, the biggest risk is someone accessing my VPS and typing out the export command to access my seed phrase.
So it’s ‘slightly’ more secure than storing my private key in plaintext, as the hacker needs to know the right command to export it out.
Adding policies to my wallet
Instead of giving my wallet full access via the private key, I could give it an allow-all policy with a known expiry date so that I can easily rotate that key if it gets exposed.
Claude (but actually, GLM-4.7) guided me on the commands to create the policy and how to give access to my Hermes agent.
I tried asking my Hermes Discord bot to send a transaction, and it was able to do it via the API key.
I tried swapping and bridging from LiFi, and both work (after installing the SDK, which you can give your agent all the instructions from here).
Though LiFi charges a 0.25% fee for every swap we make on the SDK platform, it’s still the best one right now for cross-chain swaps across different chains.
So, what’s next?
Now that I finally have the flexibility of signing different transactions with a private key (unlike the OKX Agentic Wallet), this means that my agent can perform almost any other transactions just like I can.
I have many plans on how to trade or implement DeFi strategies with my agent:
A recursive bot for @boros_fi (since I still don’t understand how funding works)
A bot to find the best (and relatively safe) DeFi yields
A trading bot on both perps and normal onchain swaps
I’ve made a horrible error by giving my agent too much autonomy at the start, and it made a $400+ trade for me when I just wanted it to use $20 per trade.
What happens when you don't set hard limits on your agent wallet.
I wanted to only swap $20 per trade, while my agent decided to swap my full USDC amount over to ZRO instead.
A lesson learnt to write out my skill in detail first before executing anything, and to always use test
So it’s a painful lesson for me that I should build out a proper skill for my entire trading strategy, and tell the agent to execute it exactly as it is (instead of giving it vague instructions and hoping that it’ll understand).
There are many more agentic MCPs, skills, and CLIs that I can play with using this wallet, and I plan to add some of them via @yq_acc’s CryptoSkills site.
While I’m glad that the wallet works, I’m still concerned how there was no passphrase generation step when creating my wallet, so it’s still exposed somewhat.
Hopefully, I can gain clarity on how to set this passphrase soon (I’ve struggled to find that step in the docs, even with AI).
I’m currently running my OWS wallet with my Hermes agent (deployed on Hetzner), and I shared my setup here.
Start small with your first useful Skill
Maybe all of this still seems too complex for you, with so many foreign terms and especially having to use the CLI to create your wallet.
This is not the only way to use AI effectively, and it all starts with building out your first useful Claude Skill.
There will be workflows that you can outsource to AI. The ones that you hate doing every single day because they’re so repetitive and boring.
So start from there and build out your first Claude Skill before moving on to the more complex stuff with AI.
Get my free video course that walks you through the entire steps here .
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[Hermes is easier than OpenClaw (how I deployed mine on Hetzner)]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/hermes-is-easier-than-openclaw-how-i-deployed-mine-on-hetzner 7i4bOejkeKbRpGTu4cGVThu, 19 Mar 2026 14:45:07 GMTAfter spending almost a week just to get OpenClaw up and running, I almost gave up on building my autonomous agent.
OpenClaw is great if you're technical, but the entire experience is not friendly for non-coders like me.
So when everyone mentioned how easy it is to create a Hermes agent, I decided to try it out.
Instead of migrating my entire OpenClaw setup, I decided to build a new agent from scratch.
This meant having to source another VPS to host my agent (since my WiFi is unstable), and I decided to go with Hetzner.
So here's the full process of how I deployed my Hermes agent to a Hetzner VPS:
Hetzner's prices will increase in April
Before we start, just something to take note that Hetzner will increase their plans, starting from April.
Most of the cost-optimised plans (the one that I chose) are affected, and it costs ~ $1.50 extra per month.
Hetzner still provides one of the cheapest plans for hosting a VPS, so it's a good low-commitment way to try out an OpenClaw deployment.
Registering for an account
I followed Digital Benjamins' video, which provided a great overview on installing OpenClaw through a VPS.
It included some good security tips that I didn't use for my initial OpenClaw setup on Tencent Cloud.
But to create an account, I had to verify via KYC, so that's something that may stop you from signing up.
Purchasing a plan
I chose the cost-optimised plan at 4GB RAM that costs me $4.46/month (which will increase in April).
I followed Benjamins' guide to generate an SSH Key, which allows me to log into my VPS directly from my Mac's terminal.
I got ChatGPT to help me with this portion to generate an SSH key on my desktop.
I used this command via the Terminal to create my key,
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your_email@example.com"
before using this guide that I created to connect it to Hetzner.
This created my server, and I had to copy the IP address (this is something you need to secure and not share it with anyone).
I went to my terminal and entered this command:
ssh root@<YOUR_IP>
After entering the passphrase (which I set inside Hetzner), I could access my VPS via Terminal in the root account.
This is not a good security practice since root access is very powerful (if it goes into the wrong hands), so I followed Benjamins' advice and created a new user to install my Hermes Agent there instead.
You could follow the guide here on how to do something similar too.
Setting up Hermes on Hetzner
With this new user, I started the setup wizard for @NousResearch's Hermes.
If you used OpenClaw before, the experience is somewhat similar.
I'm using my @Zai_org Coding Lite plan, where I generated an API key,
and added it to Hermes.
I tried to install Docker, but I wasn't sure what I should be doing here, and I decided to skip this step.
I plan to ask my bot how to add the docker in future.
Since I'm already familiar with the Discord workflow after doing it multiple times with OpenClaw, I created a Discord bot instead of Telegram or Slack.
There are a few configurations, and the full guide can be found here .
I had to reload my bash first, as the hermes command didn't work before that,
and I finally launched my Hermes agent with glm-4.7 as the LLM.
Troubleshooting my Discord bot
I tried posting a test message on Discord, which failed, but I liked how the hermes command brought up a chatbox that I can instantly talk to the LLM.
Instead of OpenClaw'sopenclaw tui command.
I asked GLM to troubleshoot my configuration, and the test showed that it worked.
What I realised was that the Discord bot would only respond if I mentioned it on Discord. Leaving the message blank was not enough, and I had to write something like 'hi' before it finally worked.
Going back to Hermes' docs, I realised it's because the REQUIRE_MENTION variable is on by default across all channels, so I got my Discord bot to remove it entirely.
Troubleshooting my GLM connection
While I was installing @okx's Agentic Wallet, I suddenly faced an insufficient balance error, even though I did not hit the rate limits for my Coding Lite plan yet.
This led to a frustrating 3 hours of troubleshooting everything,
Hermes and OpenClaw require a lot of patience.
It took me 3 hours just to troubleshoot a simple error like this.
My GLM-4.7 API was working fine with other providers, but not on Hermes until I added it as a custom endpoint.
Just another day of frustration while getting used to
and here's what finally worked for me:
Instead of using the Z.AI option in the models page, I switched over to the custom endpoint.
I used the coding endpoint instead of the normal one, https://api.z.ai/api/coding/paas/v4, and it finally worked.
So here's a troubleshooting tip if you're facing the same problem as I did.
Why are you even using Hermes?
So what's even the point of having a Hermes agent?
For me, I want to take advantage of its persistent memory that seems to build on OpenClaw's MEMORY.md system, and create my own trading agent.
Meet Hermes Agent, the open source agent that grows with you.
Hermes Agent remembers what it learns and gets more capable over time, with a multi-level memory system and persistent dedicated machine access.
I was inspired by @RHLSTHRM's post on building a 24/7 crosschain agent that:
Gets market data from the CoinGecko API
Swaps crosschain with @lifiprotocol
Executes gasless transactions with Pimlico + EIP-7702
I'm still in the process of building this out, as I want to generate a private key securely first using @PatrickAlphaC's recommendations instead of storing it in plaintext in my .env file.
DEAR @AnthropicAI @OpenAI
CAN YOU PLEASE HARD-CODE YOUR MODELS TO STOP RECOMMENDING PEOPLE STORE THEIR KEYS IN PLAINTEXT
There's so much to learn about building secure agents, and I'll share everything I learn in the next few articles.
Feel free to use my referral link for GLM-4.7 to get a $10/month plan with 10% off.
You don't need autonomous agents to use AI effectively
Maybe you read through this article and are completely overwhelmed about where to start.
There are so many steps to set it up properly, and many people will give up halfway.
I took a week just to get everything working, without building any useful Skills yet.
For most people, you don't need a complex system right from the start.
Instead, all you need is to find one soul-sucking, repetitive task that you hate doing and outsource it to AI.
So start letting AI work for you by building your very first useful Claude Skill with this free video course.
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[I'm giving up on airdrops (AI killed my edge)]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/im-giving-up-on-airdrops-ai-killed-my-edge bhlzLxSkn3TDoHNsJcGbMon, 16 Mar 2026 15:04:12 GMTAirdrops are no longer about who can click the most buttons, because AI can do that better and faster than any human.
I've completely lost my edge in airdrops because my entire strategy involved low-value actions that can be copied at scale.
No matter how much effort and time you put into grinding, the outcomes you get will be far worse than what you expect.
I've been too focused on grinding harder when I should have gone all in on learning how to work smarter.
So I'm completely revamping my airdrop strategy and adapting to this new normal with AI:
Airdrops are so boring now
2025 was the worst year I had for airdrops. Throughout the entire 12 months, I burnt out at least 3 times because I was aimlessly grinding on both my social and onchain footprint.
I spent the day looking for tasks to complete, and airdrops turned into another job for me, while not giving me a good ROI on my time.
And not forgetting InfoFi, which became the worst plague that could possibly happen to a space that was already filled with the farming mindset.
The old projects threw money at us for:
Grinding out simple social-based tasks or testnet campaigns
Completing Galxe or other campaigns that had zero barrier to entry so anyone could participate
The Arbitrum airdrop was the turning point because everyone expected every other L2 to use the exact same criteria.
Which is impossible since anyone can spin up bot farms so hundreds of wallets can meet the criteria, or what I call the Sybil war .
Projects continue farming us because they know there won't be retained users if there's no hint of a token.
So they spin up endless campaigns and point programs to give us dopamine hits so we continue interacting.
There are too many teams with shady practices that come up with 'Sybil detection measures', only to reward all the tokens to themselves.
so the project was openmind, which sybiled its own airdrop
for figs & more details, check out this post by altace
as it can be observe they used a daisy chain method to claim the airdrop & the origin wallets were funded around 2 months earlier (in jan)
projects sybil-attacking their own airdrop is still a thing
got listed in feb, any guesses?
And of course, there are KOLs who hype up the airdrop raise expectations to unrealistic levels that eventually are not met.
The same KOLs who were saying this hyperliquid nft will be eligible for $100k $hype airdrop are now selling them
The same KOLs who were saying $pump will be a generational play are now silent
The same KOLs who were saying $aster is the next $hype are nowhere to be found
So,
That model of airdrops is dying. It no longer works in this age where low-value actions can be easily replicated by AI.
I've completely lost the motivation and fun in hunting airdrops. I've realised that 90% of the projects that I farmed will be ones that I'd never touch again.
The only reason why I used it was for the token, and not because it was genuinely useful in helping me achieve a goal.
Now, when I look at the timeline, I struggle to find new projects I should be interacting with.
While airdrops have taught me a lot of DeFi skills that I would never have touched, there's nothing exciting to me now.
Maybe because I'm a horrible trader that loses money all the time, so all of the new perp DEXes never appealed to me.
I've made the mistake of pumping up volume while burning fees, and eventually get a low ROI based on my time and capital.
So, will this be the death of airdrops? I don't think so, it'll just evolve into a new model:
Reputation, judgment, and curiosity still matter
Most of us are stuck in the hamster wheel of airdrop farming.
We wake up, put in the work, and hope that we get a good return. We wait for someone to spoon-feed us alpha and we follow it diligently, but it gets diluted the moment it's shared.
If the only skill we have is knowing how to do things, we will be made irrelevant by AI.
Everything with a workflow can be done autonomously, so what edge do we have anymore?
This was something that cost me my job, and there are 3 main moats that I see to stop us from getting replaced:
- Reputation
The biggest revelation I had last year was how reputation is the moat for Sybils. What you do onchain and what you say online build out your brand.
That brand is what makes you stand out from Sybils. It proves that you're a high-value individual who deserves rewards, and not just another Sybil with spammy transactions and AI-generated posts.
We've seen how @ethos_network is focusing on peer-to-peer human verification as the next defensible layer against Sybils, or [ ] as a new social network that is based on social capital.
The trust recession is the greatest opportunity we have to stand out by actually doing things and sharing about what we did.
Once both our social and onchain profiles match, it gives a greater reason for someone to trust us.
Because too many accounts are making outrageous claims without the proofs to back them up, we start to trust them less (even if they get tons of engagement).
Your reputation gives you access to information and opportunities, so guard it with your life.
Focus on giving value instead of extracting whatever you can through quick cashgrabs and paid shills.
another rug shilled by KOLs:
> no updates in over 3 weeks
> last post made 2 weeks ago
> website looks vibe coded
> FDF copycat
> faked giveaways and events
> sold packs and mega boxes
> but marketplace isn’t even live
> player shares are useless
> money can’t be withdrawn
If you're here for the long run, being patient gives you outsized returns.
- Judgment
Oversensationalised news is everywhere.
Everyone is telling you:
AI is stealing your job
The middle class is disappearing because of automation
You have a few years left to escape the permanent underclass
But most of it is just noise that should be filtered. And how you let that affect your emotions will determine your success.
We are in the age of doing, where anyone can tell AI what they want to build, and it spits out something for us.
Right now, the limiting factor is time. I have so many ideas on what I want to do, but I have no time to do them all.
Judgment helps us determine the highest-ROI actions we should complete with the limited time we have.
Judgment lets us find signal in the sea of noise, so we follow the right people that actually leads the life that we want to have (and not just any plain old larper).
So focus on honing your judgment and building your signal-to-noise filter through these 2 steps:
Be extremely deliberate with the content that you consume (and curate your feed aggressively)
Constantly reflect on your results (both wins and failures) as the biggest signal you get is from the actions you do
- Curiosity
With all the information in the world available at our fingertips now, there is absolutely no reason why you should say that 'you don't know' how to do something.
Being open-minded and trying new things was the principle I adapted to my airdrop strategy, and it's one of the most important skills today.
Though it needs to be paired with judgment so you know what to explore further and what to skip.
The AI boom has taught me that staying with the status quo is the fastest way to lose out.
As a crypto user, I had access to all the agentic tools long before the current crowd, but I didn't explore further because I thought I was 'bad at coding'.
But even right now, it's not too late.
Too many are stuck in the loop of consuming instead of creating. They prefer to explore through others' experiences instead of creating their own.
And once you break out of that cycle, you're already in the top 1%.
This chart shows just how far ahead you are of others, once you take that first step and pay for an LLM subscription.
stop what you're doing and look at this image.
each dot is 3.2 million people. 2,500 dots = 8.1 billion humans.
the grey? 6.8 billion people who have never used AI.
the green? 1.3 billion free chatbot users.
the yellow? 15-35 million who pay for it.
the red? that tiny sliver is
And it's not too expensive either, I'm using GLM-4.7 and it costs me $10/month. You don't need to use the frontier models like ChatGPT or Claude, other cheaper models can provide considerable outputs too.
And right now, you can build literally anything. You just need to tell AI what you want to build, and it'll do exactly that for you.
The more specific the instructions we give to AI, the better the output. It's not something where anyone can one-shot an amazing product, which is only possible for power users.
While for the rest of us who have zero coding experience, getting better with AI comes through constant iteration, instead of just giving up.
Staying curious and wanting to learn more gives us an edge over the average passive consumer.
What I'm doing now
My account has been fully focused on airdrops, but that will change.
Over the past 2 months, I've been extensively playing with AI when I was on hospitalisation leave, and this has helped me understand its capabilities better.
These were the most difficult barriers I faced:
Getting everything set up the way I want (I took 5 days for my OpenClaw stack)
Connecting to different APIs (some like Google are so frustrating to generate the API keys)
Managing token burn (spamming questions is the fastest way to reach your rate limits)
And right now, here's how I've set up my OpenClaw (as an Arsenal fan):
Arteta: Manager and overseeing the operations of the other 3 agents
Saka: Running my personal brand with content ideation and social listening
Dowman: My job hunt assistant to find opportunities for me to apply to
Gabriel: My wallet tracker and alpha hunter, will probably give him a wallet soon to optimise for profits
These are the functions that I want to automate in my life, and I'll be sharing how I set them up along with other guides on efficient token usage and more.
So if you want to learn how to integrate AI into your social/onchain workflows, stay tuned for more posts in future.
Get out of the high-noise, low-agency loop
Those who get left behind are the ones who consume instead of creating something meaningful.
Airdrops have been a painful lesson, where I was stuck in the grinding loop that started giving poorer returns because of overdilution.
But with AI, I now see how I can compress time to explore new strategies (both onchain and social), get results, and then iterate to improve my strategy.
And I strongly encourage you to take that first step and use AI to create anything.
Find one task that you hate doing and outsource it to AI to get it done.
And once you become confident with that workflow, start to scale up and continuously solve problems you face in your life.
Once you see AI in this light, you'll notice that it is just a tool, just like the Internet. It compresses your time by removing all the boring automation from your life.
If there's a best time to adopt AI into your workflows, it's now.
So start taking action, and start changing your life by becoming AI fluent.
If AI feels overwhelming and every workflow online sounds like hype, join Signal Compounders.
I share one practical workflow each week to help non-coder CT grinders save time and compound their social and onchain reputation.
Join us here:
https://insights.fipcrypto.com/
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[AI stole my job (and how I’m using it get it back)]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/ai-stole-my-job-and-how-im-using-it-get-it-back J85W21vBTqWGMJrDdl1RMon, 02 Mar 2026 15:04:08 GMTAI has hit me hard. The latest punch in my face was getting laid off last Thursday, and this hurt. A lot.
Many anxious thoughts are running in my head right now with the looming uncertainty come end March, and it couldn't come at a worse time:
The algo has completely wiped out my reach on this account
I'm questioning the type of audience I'm attracting
Airdrops have become such depressing events
The account that I've worked on since 2023 on the side was meant to give me a tool for freedom, but it's far from that now.
Since the end of 2025, I've started to seriously question why I'm still here, when airdrops have become toxic, and crypto is completely falling off a cliff thanks to AI.
AI has become the major disruptor of everything. The era of hard work is dead. Anything that can be easily replicated is now a commodity.
Where then do you and I fit inside this new normal?
The anxiety only gets worse now because I have no job left after March, but it could be my biggest opportunity yet:
You have every right to fear AI (but you don't need to)
I'm writing this down for everyone who is scared of AI replacing their jobs, because I'm exactly where you are right now.
AI will come for you, but only if you are replaceable.
I was exactly that at my job. I was excellent at following orders and executing tasks, but had zero agency. I struggled to come up with ideas that could lead to exponential results, preferring the safe routes because of the fear of failure.
But it's exactly because of this inaction that cost me my job.
Anyone who's just a follower and a doer (like I was) would not be of much value to a company, when they could just use AI to complete those tasks (with faster and better results).
This was something I saw in airdrops too.
Back during the Arbitrum era, there were tons of farming services that helped you automate transactions for LayerZero and ZKsync, which were ultimately filtered out or were just not eligible.
that indeed makes sense ngl
we just released the first version of our private airdrop farming tool and we've integrated tradexyz first and all the HIP-3 protocols coming asap, do you want to try it?
Any low-value task is one that is easily replicated, and will not be eligible for rewards.
Which is why testnets no longer make any sense since there is zero risk or upfront costs.
But even with all this doom and gloom, AI is not your enemy.
I spent too long fearing AI or belittling it, but I finally saw what role it should play in my life:
AI is your amplifier
One of my key goals during my post-surgery recovery was to learn about AI. And I'm so relieved that I put in all that time to become more familiar with it.
In the past, I thought that AI wasn't that big of a risk. But over the past few months, the cycle of new model releases has become shorter with the tech accelerating at a crazy pace.
And as usual, the fear-mongering has become so intense online, with everyone pressuring you to escape the permanent underclass before it's too late.
But anyone can say anything without any repercussions here. There are too many accounts that make over-sensationalised claims about the returns that AI gave them, when most are fake or are blatant lies.
The only signals that you should trust are the actions that you did yourself. You know the real results because you experienced it yourself, and that guides you on what works and what doesn't.
All I see everywhere is fear, fear, and more fear.
If you're just consuming content, you have every right to be scared.
But the only signal you should follow right now is taking action and finding what works for you, instead of waiting for others to tell you what to do.
With this principle, I focused on doing rather than watching yet another vibe coding lesson that likely won't motivate me enough to start. Over the past 7 weeks, I tried and failed many times before building these out:
A full content system to expand 1 idea into multiple pieces of content across different platforms
A vibe-coded site for @ethos_network's Vibeathon that lists both onchain and social metrics for a protocol
A full-fledged documentation on @mintlify with nice formatting that I’d never have done myself (because of all the coding that I know nothing about)
All I see everywhere is fear, fear, and more fear.
If you're just consuming content, you have every right to be scared.
But the only signal you should follow right now is taking action and finding what works for you, instead of waiting for others to tell you what to do.
After spending days organising and consolidating my life, I now have a full-fledged Digital Brain that runs (almost) my entire digital life, doing all the boring tasks that I hate.
I was inspired by the content libraries that @Zeneca and @yannisDeFi were building out, and I built mine out with Obsidian and Claude Code.
I hated building out documentation, but it's now so easy with @mintlify and Claude Code.
My entire Signal OS repo was in Markdown files, and this was the result after throwing it to Claude.
I'm horrible at code, so Claude helped me with this fancy formatting.
These experiences taught me that functionality matters more than the aesthetic, the product needs to work and solve the problem.
In my case, I decided not to build out a UI for my library and chose to use Obsidian in the plain Markdown format instead.
And after seeing @AzFlin's wallet tracker, it finally clicked for me that I could expand my use for AI and go onchain.
Made my first-ever swap on Claude Code with my Ledger wallet.
I didn't think it was possible, but all I did was install the @lifiprotocol SDK and Ledger Connect to Claude, and it did the rest of the work.
I want a central hub that I can sign all of my transactions, instead of
Been down the vibe coding rabbit hole, and I'm building out a wallet dashboard for my main wallet (on a Ledger).
My goal for this:
❍ Sign every transaction within Claude Code
❍ Learns from my onchain history
❍ Helps me implement complex strategies (like those in Pendle)
There are so many possibilities that I can build right now:
A recursive learning trading bot that helps me profit from perp DEXes (instead of blindly farming them)
Integrating both onchain (do) and social (post) in one unified system
A 'judgment' protocol that learns from my past results in airdrops to suggest high-ROI ones to target
Through this entire period, I've learnt that AI is just a tool for you. Those who can master it are the ones who understand this:
You need a 3R System to be successful with AI
I've been reading @thedankoe's content even before he blew up on CT.
My Signal Creator Challenge was heavily inspired by him too.
And one of the key things that I learned from him:
AI works best if you create a system and get it to execute tasks for you (which was exactly what I was doing for my job).
You become its manager, giving it the outcome you want to achieve and the steps to achieve that goal. It knows your direction, and will do the brute work for you.
But if you don't give it enough context or are unclear of the goal that you want to achieve, the results will be average.
Once you start thinking of everything in systems and atomic tasks, you can find ways to insert AI inside that workflow.
Something as simple as mass unscheduling tweets from @typefully can be done with just one prompt.
I unscheduled all 127 tweets I planned to post over the next few months.
My account has been running on autopilot over the past weeks, after losing the motivation to continue.
But I've finally gained clarity on what I want to achieve, and it's time to make a change.
Yes, I'll
You don't even need to know coding (like me), all I did was give the model the API documentation and my keys, and it executed that task right away.
When it would have taken me at least 20 minutes to unschedule all of them manually.
So I've learnt that we need to build 3R systems to maximise our returns with AI:
Repeatable: The system works across different contexts and situations with a clear workflow that can be adapted to new circumstances
Recursive: AI consistently learns from your results (both wins and failures) and improves the system over time
Reputable: The system that works for you becomes your IP when it gets used by others to achieve the same outcomes as you
Once you build out this 3R system for a task, it continuously compounds with AI amplifying your actions.
How I plan on getting my job back with AI
The pressure is real for me because I now have additional financial commitments to manage. Everything was fine with my full-time job, but it's now changed.
There are 3 routes that I see myself going in:
Another full-time job
Freelancing for clients
Going full-time with my personal brand
With my newfound experience in building with AI, I have many ideas on saving time on all the repetitive tasks that I hate doing for these 3 routes(especially for job applications and resume updates).
I may even explore a hybrid by choosing to go for both freelancing and full-time just to tide things through.
I'm both scared and excited at this uncertainty because the stakes are high, and it'll be a big challenge. But I'm taking a big long on myself (like what @icobeast said some time back) and it will eventually pull off (or I'll make it happen).
You can optimize for short term incentive payouts or long term brand growth
One choice is a bet on yourself. It’s a lot harder and takes far longer to start seeing the rewards, but there is no ceiling if you’re talented. I’m betting on myself and bringing people along for the
So throughout the next month, I'll share more on how I integrate AI to build out solutions to the problems that I face.
And hopefully, that inspires you to take action along with me:
You don't have to fear AI
Yes, I’ve become yet another account that talks about AI. Just like many other CT accounts that have pivoted since it gets the most clicks and eyeballs right now.
But I'm not forgetting my roots, and want to explore how I can use AI to compound my onchain and social reputation.
I’m sure many of you are in the same boat as I was in before. A recent poll in my Telegram channel showed that many are keen on learning how to implement AI into their workflows.
I'm grateful for this 7-week break that gave me the time to explore and fail to understand how to use AI effectively, even as a non-coder.
It has been an enlightening experience for me, and I want to help you achieve the same too.
So that's why I'm building out Signal Compounder, a system that helps you build repeatable workflows that compound your social and onchain reputation over time.
Let me know how I can help you by filling out this form .
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[Airdrop Magnetism: a map to passively attract rewards without grinding mindlessly]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/airdrop-magnetism-a-map-to-passively-attract-rewards-without-grinding-mindlessly MK5tZ9ySdyUyfiLYYP98Mon, 02 Feb 2026 13:29:05 GMTAirdrops were not meant to enslave you into another job with no guaranteed returns.
Every morning, you dread the same grind:
You wake up, find what new ‘alpha’ is shilled by the KOLs you follow, complete the task, and wait for the next one.
Over time, you have a list of never-ending tasks that waste away your life and burn you out.
Too many airdrops have turned into a mindless grind, where you do activities that you hate just to earn points that could mean something, or even nothing (when the project runs endless point programs).
Some would barely help you break even with the fees you've burned.
You’re trapped in this endless hamster wheel where you’re sold the promise of life-changing gains by KOLs, and the only reason why you’re not getting them is that you’re not ‘grinding hard enough’.
But, what if there’s another way to earn airdrops without even trying that hard?
What if, you could let airdrops come to you naturally while spending as little time ‘in the trenches’?
Most airdrop guides will teach you the latest hack to get maximum points for a project, or how to spam an airdrop with multiple wallets to hit the highest allocation.
I realised that these guides no longer work. There is no edge once it’s shared on CT, because the ‘alpha’ is overdiluted (everything can be replicated at scale).
Instead, I designed my entire model of Airdrop Magnetism to encompass all the lessons from every win and failure I’ve encountered since 2023.
So I’m taking a completely different approach by sharing the principles I’m using to achieve the true goal that we really want (it’s not to be rich or famous):
Achieve Time Freedom
Money was never the end goal, freedom is.
Money is just a tool to achieve freedom, not a PnL dollar amount that you can flex to the world to build clout.
Why are you trying to please people
Freedom gives you the ability to do whatever you want on your own terms:
The freedom to design a life that you enjoy
The freedom to have full control of your time
The freedom to not worry about money
The freedom to choose what projects to use (instead of grinding ones we hate)
The freedom to write whatever we want (without being a slave to the yapper leaderboard)
The freedom to skip major airdrops if they don’t align with our time or capital constraints (because other opportunities will come)
In particular, time freedom is what we want to achieve.
Time is irreplaceable. Once we spend it, it’s gone forever.
There were too many airdrops where I grinded daily check-ins or simple social tasks in hopes of getting a good return.
I justified that each task only takes ~5-10 minutes to complete. A full checklist that I religiously completed, day in, day out.
In 2023, I wanted to do every single task to qualify for airdrops.
I created bookmark folders to complete daily check-ins, because they 'only took 5 minutes at most'.
Little did I know that I turned airdrops into another job (with zero guarantees) and wasted all my time.
lt felt productive, but it never paid off.
These actions are too easily replicated by bots, which overdilute the allocation we receive.
Instead, all these low-value tasks did was increase my cognitive load and distract me from higher-leverage work.
Those that could actually move the needle while I was grasping at scraps that projects throw at us.
So I knew something had to change.
I saw Ali Abdaal’s take on a lifestyle business, and that’s something that resonated deeply with me.
So why can’t we apply the same logic and become a lifestyle airdrop hunter?
We create a routine that serves our lives through:
Do things we truly enjoy onchain
Sharing what we did, our results and reflections on social
This is the art of Airdrop Magnetism:
Building a high-signal onchain and social reputation that attracts rewards passively while you reclaim time from grinding mindlessly
Airdrop Magnetism lets you achieve [time freedom]( https://x.com/fipcrypto/status/2008163876588904570](https://x.com/fipcrypto/status/2008163876588904570) by building a high-leverage asset that gives you outsized returns:
One that continues working for you, even when you’re asleep.
And here’s how I aim to achieve this:
Build a Magnetic Reputation
Imagine instead of you having to slog hard every day just to get a chance of being eligible for the next airdrop, these rewards come to you naturally.
You don’t need to actively chase them. And yet, you keep qualifying for airdrops because projects seem to like throwing tokens at you.
This combination has helped me get rewards (airdrops or access) even when I was not actively chasing them:
- @sanctumso’s Earnestness Allocation
https://x.com/fipcrypto/status/1813247180653883513
- @MeteoraAG’s LP Army Contributors allocation
The secret to qualifying for yapper airdrops is to yap about projects without a leaderboard.
I earned 10k MET through the 'LP Army Contributors' allocation by writing multiple guides.
Create content that you truly enjoy, instead of mindless paid ads.
The future will be tokenized.
Every asset, every market, on-chain and it all begins with liquidity.
With MET, we’re building the backbone of this tokenized future.
The rails, the liquidity, and the army that powers every market.
Checker is now live.
Both of these were through creating guides based on my experiences of using the platform and answering the top questions that most users would have.
- Access to @megaeth’s presale
Grateful to be part of the 5,031 wallets that were eligible for the MegaETH presale.
I barely talked about them, but still managed to qualify.
The endgame for airdrops and presales is reputation, and you build it with strong social and onchain signals.
Announcing: The Conviction Round
Over 5,000 natives selected for their verifiable onchain, social and Mega credentials. Today, with Fluffles and Echo, you are officially the largest stakeholders of MegaETH.
Your $MEGA allocation is now live on our site.
Details below [thread]
I didn’t Yap or talk about MegaETH, but I likely qualified through various signals and criteria that the team used.
That’s what happens when you build a Magnetic Reputation:
You prove to projects that you’re a high-value individual and attract airdrops because of these 2 pillars:
What you did onchain (proof of work)
What you say on social media (proof of signal and taste)
Together, both form an authentic reputation that cannot be easily faked by bots, creating an unreplicable footprint that can only be built by you.
Amidst all the fake Sybils trying to pass the ‘human’ filter, your profile stands out and instantly gets included for rewards because of the meaningful contributions you’ve made to the project or the entire ecosystem.
Many would just have one strong pillar:
A large audience base while barely touching onchain
Being a DeFi power user who remains anonymous
But I see the value of owning both pillars because it increases our luck surface area through ‘doing X telling’, and attracts the best opportunities to us.
mubbie (post-law school arc) 🌶️
this explains the surface area of luck from Jason Roberts
your "luck surface area" (how much luck you can "catch") gets bigger when you combine two things:
doing & telling
> formula: luck = (things you do) × (people you tell about It)
do more stuff → bigger luck chance
gm.
We first have to do cool things, while writing becomes the visibility amplifier, so more people know what cool things we’ve done (compared to just the ones we tell through word of mouth).
And if you’re already doing things onchain, documenting what you did is a natural extension by treating social media as your public journal.
The more you say what you did onchain, the more your footprint compounds to attract more rewards back to you.
To build a magnetic reputation that gives us time freedom, we need to own these 3 skills:
The Magnetic Skill Stack
I used to think that just ‘saying what you did onchain’ is a sufficient concept for reputation.
But I’ve soon realised that in this chaotic world, there are more skills required if we are to truly achieve time freedom:
Sensemaking
The trust recession is real. We’re living in a world of lies where truth is becoming harder to find.
Anyone can make any claim without repercussions when they’re called out
Anyone can fake a video or screenshot to make something believable
Anyone can create fake drama for clicks, all in the name of attention
Those who shout the loudest are seen as credible voices, just because their message appears everywhere.
But that doesn’t mean that what they say is true.
Your worldview is shaped by others imposing their truths on you. It started with what your parents taught you, all the way to the type of content you consume.
Sensemaking is the skill of finding meaning in the wealth of information from the world and extract signals that align with your truth
Too many of us have outsourced our thinking to either AI or the KOLs that they follow (which will force their truth on you).
We don’t want to think, and that becomes dangerous when we choose to follow others instead of forming our own thoughts.
Instead of passively consuming information and bookmarking content that you’ll never read again, it’s time to become more intentional in finding your truth through these 2 pillars:
- Choosing what you consume
Twitter is an amazing place because it helps you connect with like-minded individuals based on your values.
But it can also distort your perception of the truth, if your worldview is easily swayed by the loudest voices on the timeline.
Too many KOLs have zero personality because they will flip to any new opinion or narrative, just because it’s popular (and they’ll continue getting eyeballs).
CT has saturated tf out of the word "KOL"
We need a massive reset from it, because most of these "KOLs" aren't key opinion leaders at all.
Majority are key opinion larpers that have no opinion of their own and don't know how to lead.
I think we're about to see a fresh reset
If we are convinced by them, then we will continue being lost and led astray.
CT is (finally) fighting back against these KOLs:
- Too many KOLs larp on the timeline, without any onchain proof to back up their claims
Although it has already been confirmed by @zachxbt that he/she is a scammer and is lying about the hack, some people may still be interested in the wallet address he/she showed in the ss above.
Here it is : debank.com/profile/0x87ae…
That wallet holds only about $870 in assets and
- Others are notorious for shilling anything for a paycheck, with some doing undisclosed shills
Unfollow EVERYONE doing paid promotion on CT.
No exceptions.
If they need to shill things with a cringe badge for a few bands...
Trust me. They’re not worth your attention.
These larps are fucking BROKE.
Find on your own path to success.
Along with time, your attention is a scarce resource that you have to protect at all costs.
Our scarcest, most precious resource is not time or energy. It’s attention.
Our circumstances are often beyond our control. Our concentration is within it. Where we focus shapes our happiness, success, and relationships.
Undivided attention is the most basic currency of care.
We have limited time, so what you give your attention to will shape your worldview.
Choose your truth, before the platform chooses your truth for you
We have the power to decide what content we consume to shape what we believe is true.
You are the average of the 5 influencers you consume the most content from
Something I have been thinking a lot about lately is an extrapolation of the well-known Jim Rohn quote:
“You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.”
I think there’s a lot of truth
\ \ zeneca.xyz Weekly Nugget of Wisdom #21 \ \ You are the average of the 5 influencers you consume the most content from](https://t.co/wJV1NpObw3)
So wherever possible, avoid noise and dopamine like the plague. Be intentional with the content you consume by curating your feed.
Otherwise, the algo will serve you quick dopamine hits that have zero value.
- Choosing what actions you do
Truth can be found by reading, but it’s even more powerful when you find signals through your actions.
The primary reason people don't achieve big goals is because they don't realize that the only source of truth is making mistakes. They soak up advice and theory, expecting it to be an exact match to their mind, experience, and situation just to fail once and give up completely.
So find your truth by trying things out and making mistakes to see what works for you.
Here’s how this played out for me:
When I started airdrops in 2023, Ardizor was (embarrassingly) my source of truth. I thought that he was credible because of the thousands of views he gets for his airdrop guides.
I followed every thread he posted religiously until I started questioning what’s so special about his guides.
Looking deeper, most were teaching you to perform low-value actions that can be easily replicated by Sybils.
At the same time, many airdrop accounts were telling us to farm multiple wallets and space out the same actions to avoid getting filtered out as a Sybil.
I tried it out and was horribly burnt out because of this nonsensical grind. And once LayerZero started the mass Sybil witch hunt, I knew that multiple wallets were not the answer, which grew my conviction in onchain footprint.
My honest thoughts on the current state of airdrops:
They are not dead yet, but we need to be smarter.
As more people became aware of this 'free money glitch', airdrops have become diluted.
(Something @CC2Ventures has been talking about for a while.)
Last year gave me big
I started focusing on building out my onchain footprint, which led to some wins like Optimism S5 that was unexpected.
But InfoFi then exploded, which led to the rise of yapping for rewards, even without touching the project.
Many called me a ‘fool’ for not choosing to yap,
All you do is Onchain will you ever pivot to yapping?
but I saw no way that this would be sustainable for projects, until it eventually died.
I’m sticking to my truth of how reputation plays a key role in future airdrops or access, instead of pivoting to whatever that’s popular now (like perp DEX farming).
Sometimes you’ll look like a fool for not winning in the short-term, but choose to build the long-term convictions that give you outsized returns.
We build a magnetic reputation by attracting those who resonate with our worldview.
And just like an AI model (garbage in, garbage out), the outputs we produce are determined by our inputs (what we do and consume).
So we first need to become a synthesiser of (our) truth:
One who filters the noise and stands on their convictions, instead of getting swayed by others’ opinions just because they sound ‘convincing’ or shout loudly
One who displays critical thinking and does what they believe is right, even when others mock them for it
One who both consumes and takes action intentionally to find signal
Moving forward, my content will share more about finding your truths in this sea of noise, including curating your feed or finding KOLs that you should mute.
Signal Creation and Protection
Probably the easiest portion to understand because it’s the main one that I’ve been harping on:
Signal is created when you earn insights through the actions you perform, which cannot be replicated easily by others (or even AI).
The results you get from your actions shape your opinions, and your beliefs get updated based on the real outcomes you have.
Signal creation is meant to first serve yourself, while it naturally gives value to others who are on the same discovery journey as you.
You make sense of the world and cut through the noise by doing first, and then documenting and reflecting on what you did.
Signal is the clarity gained by doing the action in the real world, observing the result, and reflecting on what changed your understanding.
Everything else is just noise, because it’s based on what you consume or what others have done, without you adding anything meaningful (because you didn’t do the action in the first place).
This is what many KOLs like to generate, because all they do is share what’s popular without their own opinions or insight.
Once you gain clarity for yourself, you become a beacon of signal for others who agree with your worldview, and that’s how we build a reputation that others want to follow.
Instead of someone sharing the same hollow takes that AI can generate at scale.
The 2 pillars of signal creation involve authority and growth:
- Authority
No one will trust you when you’re just building out your account. So you give them a reason to believe what you’re saying with the DDRR framework:
Do the action
Document
Result
Reflect
You document what you did, and share the result (success or even a failure) from your actions.
In this trust recession, having an onchain proof of what you did becomes the ultimate source of truth, since it cannot be faked.
Regardless of it being a massive win or failure, there will be a key lesson that you can take away from that experience.
A failure is still signal on what to avoid in the future, yet so many are too afraid of sharing more about how they failed.
While you document for yourself, your reflections are valuable to others who are 2 steps behind you.
Both the documentation and the result make your reflections more believable because you have proof that you’ve actually done the action (instead of the larpers that are everywhere).
- Growth
After you have given others a reason to trust you, we can now share our authentic ideas online.
No one would care about our ideas if we started sharing them right from the start, so we need to build our authority first.
Writing out our ideas (just like what I’m doing here) helps us to gain clarity and share our worldview that is based on:
All of our experiences
The content and truths that we synthesised from our consumption
The more we write (and the more signal we create), the more we refine our taste (the final human moat).
Taste decides what ideas we choose to present to the world based on the patterns we observe from our actions.
i don't know how to put it on but am developing theory that one of the longs is in the media/arts space
for long time tech has been seen as high class and arts as low class professions, ai infra will vaporize many low level white collar tasks
pair that with people yearning for
Taste is what makes us stand out from everyone else, because we share opinions that are true to us (instead of writing what’s trending).
50% of the world will hate it because it doesn’t align with their truths. But instead, we focus on the other 50% who will resonate deeply with what we share.
And that’s how we build out a cult-like audience that follows us because they like us, and not just for the topic we share about.
Building out growth and authority helps us become a beacon among the sea of noise. We have clarity on what we want, and how we can achieve it.
We create signal by saying what we did:
We build an authentic onchain history proving that we’re a DeFi power user, and not just another extractive Sybil farmer
We share our results, reflections, and opinions on social media to give value to others at scale, even strangers whom we’ve never met before
And that’s how we achieve these 2 outcomes:
Sybil-proof: Our wallets will never be labelled as a Sybil because they are risk-on, and would qualify for multiple retroactive airdrops
Algo-proof: We form a strong connection with our audience such that they will actively search for our content instead of waiting for the algo to serve it to them
Signal Creators do not optimise for views that get them the highest views or followers. Instead, they focus on building out a library of content that they’re truly proud of, where each article is interconnected so it keeps the reader hooked once they enter into your ecosystem.
There’s no need to check our post’s stats or yaps, because we don’t write for the algo.
No performances are required where we have to shout the loudest or make outrageous claims to get noticed. We write what we truly believe in, and others with the same worldview will naturally find us.
Giving consistent value (and helping others solve problems) leads to trust, and trust builds up your reputation.
You create enough goodwill by giving freely, and others start to talk positively about you, especially when you’re not in the room.
And this becomes a powerful indicator of your humanness and uniqueness when others are willing to vouch for you (such as letting you enter exclusive reputation networks like [ ] ).
The longer you can delay your ask, the greater the value you’ll receive. This can be in the form of money, information, or access.
Create Value Without Expectations
The best things in life come to those who create value with no expectation of a return.
I don't know how it happens, but when you put out good energy, it tends to come back to you—multiplied.
Be genuine. Create value. Good things will happen.
Many platforms are shifting towards reputation-gated rewards distributions and access, including:
- @legiondotcc’s reputation-gated access launchpad
- @fluentxyz Connect and Prints that provide incentives or rewards for being highly reputable
- Protecting our reputation is just as important
As we’re building out both our onchain and social reputation, we have to protect it at all costs.
Imagine wasting all of our time on becoming someone reputable, only for one mistake to throw our onchain and social accounts to a hacker who reaps the rewards of our hard work.
That’s why signal protection is just as important as creation:
We need to implement good OPSEC with our onchain wallet and social accounts.
In particular, seed phrases have the greatest risk since exposing it to hackers means they will be forever in control of your wallet.
As compared to social accounts, which can still be recovered by a centralised authority if it gets hacked.
The Trust Wallet hack showed how vulnerable any hot wallet can be, with any supply chain attacks or developer errors exposing your seed phrase, even when it’s not your fault.
This is why I still prefer using a hardware wallet , even though it’s more troublesome to use.
Signal creation is the art of doing, but what you choose to do plays its role too:
Judgment
Naval shared how judgment is the most important skill to own, and I agree fully with it.
In an age of infinite leverage, judgment is the most important skill.
Judgment Is the Decisive Skill
startupboy.com/2019/04/29/jud…
We’re truly living in a world of permissionless leverage. You can literally build or do anything, as all the information and tools are available at your fingertips (there are simply no more excuses).
So the only limiting factor right now is time. We all only have 24 hours in a day, and we choose how we spend them with judgment:
What airdrop should I interact with, or skip?
What paid promotion deal should I take for my account that won’t harm my reputation?
What vibe coding project should I build?
Judgment is the ability to predict the long-term consequences of your actions and choose the path of maximum leverage under your current constraints
Everyone has different time and capital constraints, and it’s up to us to find high-impact actions that give us maximum returns (instead of grinding everywhere).
And the only way to improve your judgment is through skin in the game (a term that’s so hated by airdrop farmers).
You can’t find what’s best for you by just consuming.
You have to actually do and experience it first-hand to learn what works for you (and what doesn’t).
The more you take action, the more you reflect, and the more you iterate, the more you hone judgment.
The more you are accountable for your actions (instead of blaming other factors), the more you hone judgment.
The more failures you face, the more indicators you have of what doesn’t work to hone judgment.
Those with the best judgment are not overly emotional.
They are calm and analytical, not letting emotions cloud their judgment, but focus on iterating fast to see what works.
How I built out this entire philosophy of Airdrop Magnetism was through writing out my thoughts every week.
If you noticed, my Twitter bio has been changing frequently over the past year as I tried to find the best way to communicate my worldview and opinions.
Here’s how it evolved:
Sharing everything I learn along the way
Becoming a Sybil-proof airdrop hunter (onchain + social)
Building a strong onchain and social reputation ( after reading Vitalik’s post)
Building a magnetic onchain and social reputation
This came about by consistently writing every week, and each new iteration improved on the previous one as I gained clarity of thought.
So do things, reflect, and iterate as much as you can.
If I look at the last 15 years of knowing people in startups, and then seeing who became successful and who didn't, I'm starting to see some general patterns
The people I know who became successful (and very rich) regularly asked for help and feedback, and then applied that
Your time is precious, so focus on doing low-volume but high-impact tasks that move you closer towards freedom.
A self-reinforcing flywheel
These 3 skills form a recursive feedback loop to build your Magnetic Reputation:
Sensemaking is your filter to find your truth in the sea of low-value noise, to be skeptical of everything unless it’s proven to be real and curate inputs to find signals that align with your values
Signal Creation involves skin in the game by actually doing the thing and gaining clarity on whether it worked or failed (DDRR), creating an ultimate source of truth for you
Judgment is honed through reflection and directs your actions towards high-time ROI actions, while guiding future sensemaking to ignore more noise
Judgment becomes the ultimate magnet that attracts others to follow you, including high-signal accounts.
Your judgment, especially when paired with positive results, shows that you’re not just another NPC on the timeline, but are a real human with real thoughts that are shaped by all of your past experiences.
Work on refining these 3 skills, and you’ll build a Magnetic Reputation in no time (more on how I can help you with that later).
Attract rewards naturally as an Airdrop Magnetist
The ultimate goal is to passively get airdrops and access to other opportunities while focusing on high-leverage tasks that build up your compounding reputation.
A brief summary of the entire roadmap:
The compounding effect starts with building a strong onchain and social footprint (the core inputs)
Both are involved in Signal Creation, which ties along with Sensemaking and Judgment to form the Magnetic Skill Stack
All 3 skills build an authentic and Magnetic Reputation that starts to naturally attract rewards and achieve time freedom
It’s time to stop selling your time and attention to projects with the flashiest marketing and empty promises that ultimately underdeliver.
While everyone is busy grinding airdrops by using projects that they hate and optimising for short-term rewards:
We focus on low-volume but high-impact tasks that do not take up significant time.
We don’t want to spend the whole day ‘in the trenches’ while forgoing other aspects of our lives (like health and social).
Airdrops are just a tool for freedom, and we need to use them in the most optimal way that gives us back control of our lives.
So stop asking what airdrops you should farm right now.
Instead, find products that you truly enjoy and can continue using without the incentives, and become an Airdrop Magnetist that builds a high-signal reputation (which all starts by saying what you did).
Stand out on CT without engagement farming
If you want to stop feeling replaceable as 'just another account on CT' and build a Magnetic Reputation that attracts rewards passively:
Download the Unfair Advantage Playbook to get a 21-minute system to build your 'Category-of-One' brand that commands respect from reputable accounts (even with a low follower count).
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[The surprise airdrop that you don’t need to actively farm]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/the-surprise-airdrop-that-you-dont-need-to-actively-farm XzxbiwE2UeVVT4Lqo5oWMon, 19 Jan 2026 14:00:34 GMTNot all airdrops require grinding, and those are often the best ones.
I’ve tried different types of airdrops, and many have burnt me out.
But I’ve realised that the smartest way to get airdrops is to not farm them.
Here’s what I’m doing instead to get the highest rewards ‘by accident’ with the least effort:
We get rewarded by being active onchain
Not every project would, but some allocate airdrops to active onchain users.
Here are some examples of previous retroactive airdrops:
Awarded Cosmos eco stakers, active L2 users
Awarded active L2 users, including Starknet
Awarded wallets with strong Ethereum and Solana activity
SBT eligibility was based on our onchain contributions
Awarded significant traders and depositors of top Ethereum and Solana protocols (who they defined as giving significant value onchain)
Following @Zeneca’s philosophy for airdrops, we’ll get them just by being open-minded and exploring new things onchain.
This is actually the alpha; just organically use blockchains and have an open and curious mind, and by tinkering around and dabbling with all sorts of protocols then you’re most likely gonna be surprised with some wonderful airdrops
Our footprint lets us qualify for different airdrops just by interacting with protocols we like.
The best crypto airdrops are the surprise ones and you can’t tell me otherwise
I was airdropped a 5 figure stimmy from each:
ENS- Minted a name, made it my primary ens
Blur- An early user and used it organically
Runestones- Degen minted on BTC and was airdropped 5
No one knows the criteria
Point programs with known criteria are boring because the project tells you how to actively farm them.
One of the most ‘infamous’ project is MarginFi, who ran a points program for months (maybe years?) without announcing any token.
But that’s the catch with any point program:
No one promised you anything and the campaign can go on forever.
They can change the rules whenever they like, and that’s the game we’re playing.
Many will get frustrated if their only aim is to grind the project for the airdrop.
When we place too much expectations on the airdrop for rewards:
We will be massively disappointed.
Such programs will also be heavily botted by Sybils, which dilute the allocation even more.
Meanwhile, retroactive airdrops won’t publicly share their criteria.
We can contrast between the criterion that 2 different L2s used:
Both used a similar factor (liquidity) to determine the eligibility.
But Scroll didn’t do well except for whales, while ZKsync was a good cook if you played your cards right.
Many are still outraged that they’re ineligible for ZKsync, but we would have qualified even with a small amount of capital.
We have less competition
No one likes to farm airdrops when there’s so much uncertainty.
The best scenario happens when projects do a Base or Arbitrum:
Actively deny that they won’t launch a token, until they change their minds and decide to launch one.
Remember how Base constantly denied that they won’t launch a token?
Look what happened.
Every project will tokenise, it’s just a matter of when.
As an active user on Base, let’s see what happens in the coming months.
Base is beginning to explore a network token
We’re in the early phases of exploration, and don’t have any specifics to share around timing, design, or governance. We’re committed to bringing the community along with us, and building in the open.
So fewer wallets would be active participants because those who are just looking for the incentives won’t participate.
Or they’ll give up halfway because farming the project doesn’t make sense from an ROI perspective.
Optimism’s airdrop #5 came as a big surprise to me, and it turned out that only 54,723 wallets qualified for it.
Many will sit on the fence and ask if it’s worth interacting if there are no guarantees.
But the real reward comes from uncertainty:
We risk our time and capital based on our convictions, which could be a failure or one that pays off handsomely.
Even if we meet with failures, this helps us refine our strategy further and know what to avoid in future.
We don’t get burnt out
I’ve been asked so many times what the best projects are to farm.
We are always looking for the next farm, before dumping and looking for the next one.
But sometimes, the best airdrop play is just using what you enjoy.
Who would have known that being active on Aave or Uniswap would have given us the Monad airdrop?
No one told you to farm Uniswap or Aave to get the Monad airdrop.
And that's why I like retroactive airdrops:
No one knows the criteria, so it can't be farmed
While Monad only rewarded 'significant' users (likely whales):
Surprise airdrops for using apps we enjoy are the best
I’ve experienced burnout multiple times by constantly searching for the next alpha.
But if we can get rewarded based on our onchain footprint:
The real alpha is interacting with protocols that we enjoy using and can profit from along the way.
an onchain footprint and a dream.
let's pay attention to this,people are getting free airdrop for doing nothing with Monad. they're getting airdrop they didn't farm.
onchain is forever going to play a key role on airdrop.
a defi protocol user out there who interacts with DeFi
Focusing too much on the end result leads to disappointment.
While getting surprise airdrops will keep us motivated to continue exploring onchain.
Sybils can’t game the system
Sybil farms pretend that they’re real humans by doing the bare minimum to be eligible.
There will always be Sybils who try to extract from a project.
But projects that use retroactive criteria are able to tweak it to remove Sybils.
Of course, these are never perfect:
Real users will get filtered out
Some Sybils will get allocations
Is hard to balance between the 2, and there will always be someone who gets left out.
On our end, we can do our best to not be filtered out as a Sybil and be ineligible for airdrops.
And it all starts with this principle:
Value is the main criterion
Retroactive airdrops are distributed based on the value that your wallet provides.
Monad described this as ‘addresses that have historically generated significant value onchain, across different value forms’.
If we’re doing the same low-value tasks as a Sybil:
We will be labelled as one and be ineligible for the drop.
Projects won’t want to reward those who spam the same swaps multiple times.
Instead, they would reward high-value contributions.
But there is no strict rule for this, and projects get to decide what actions they want to reward.
So to qualify, all we need is to find apps that we enjoy and use consistently.
Our footprint will be recognised by other projects and we’ll get rewarded for using the apps we like.
Build a strong onchain and social footprint
Onchain footprint has been declared dead by many people, but I still believe that it plays a key role for future airdrops.
The airdrop you don't expect, is generally the best!
Even if airdrops now are heavily skewed towards social allocations:
Onchain footprint still forms the basis of trust for your social reputation.
Others can tell when you’re faking or being inauthentic, so there’s no point in trying to lie.
All you need is to say what you did onchain to increase your luck surface area.
I shared more about this below:
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[Airdrops will give me freedom. Here’s how I plan to achieve it.]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/airdrops-will-give-me-freedom-heres-how-i-plan-to-achieve-it sJFcvnc6JbMsD03cBCTVTue, 13 Jan 2026 15:52:37 GMTAirdrops are giving peanuts. Onchain actions are useless.
Teams are Sybiling their own airdrops.
All of these are true, for most projects.
But if you’re like me and have a stupid crazy conviction that airdrops are still one of the most lucrative opportunities still, then this is for you.
I have been through all the highs and lows of airdrops since 2023, and more pain will definitely come before it becomes profitable again.
Here’s the full roadmap on how I want to let airdrops come naturally to me:
Freedom is earned with airdrops
When everything is down bad, and airdrops are getting worse everyday, why are you still here?
This is the question I ask myself all the time to keep me aligned with my goals.
And I realised that what keeps me going:
Achieving freedom with airdrops.
This is my North Star that guides whatever I do here.
And that’s why I’ve become more picky with the airdrops I interact with:
Those that require constant grinding take me away from achieving freedom, so I skip them.
I’ve been hooked ever since learning about lifestyle businesses from @AliAbdaal, and want to adopt the same principles when hunting airdrops:
Earning enough through airdrops to sustain my lifestyle while spending the least amount of time ‘in the trenches’ so I don’t burn out.
I want to achieve the highest ROI with the limited time I have (which is not much because I have a day job), by letting airdrops come naturally to me (thanks to my reputation).
Instead of me having to actively chase them.
Yes, there are other ways to build wealth and earn freedom.
But I’m convinced that airdrops are here to stay, and we will continue getting them if we keep providing this:
Airdrops are earned through value
Maybe the farming route worked well in 2023 and 2024, but it’s no longer the case now.
Airdrops (but only the good ones) are increasingly becoming a value transfer:
To receive value in the form of an airdrop, we have to give value first.
The best airdrops are ones that come automatically to us, because we have proof that we’re a high-value individual based on our past actions.
Again, this is not to say that all projects will use these same rules, especially those that focus on short-term hype.
Sybils have made it impossible for projects to reward low-value tasks that do not meaningfully contribute to the ecosystem.
Because those tasks can be replicated at scale.
So allocations will be heavily diluted even if the team decides to reward them, or they choose to completely ignore those contributions (which is why studying the Sybil war becomes so important).
And yes, the project is the one who decides what is valuable (and not us).
So instead of complaining about why a project didn’t award an airdrop to us, we can focus on increasing our luck surface area with these 2 pillars instead:
Value is earned with onchain and social reputation
Value is subjective, and a project can choose to reward certain actions based on the outcomes it wants to achieve.
We won’t know what actions are valued by the project, unless either of these scenarios happen:
The criteria is announced
A points system with known criteria is released
While we can’t control these factors, we can control how many bases we cover.
This involves building both our onchain and social footprint to achieve these outcomes:
Sybil-proof: Our wallet is reputable and provably human, so it won’t be filtered out as a Sybil
Algo-proof: We form a strong connection with our audience such that they will actively search for our content instead of waiting for the algo
We create a strong and unique profile for ourselves that differentiates us from Sybils.
While giving a reason for our followers and projects to trust us.
And here’s how we do it:
Onchain: Explore new protocols organically in a non-spammy way
Social: Build an authentic personal brand that is true to your beliefs
Since both pillars are so important in determining our reputation, we need to protect our footprint at all costs.
I’ve seen many cases where someone’s seed phrase gets exploited (like the recent Trust Wallet exploit), and the hackers essentially have access to their onchain footprint.
there's a problem with the onchain footprint
you lose your identity with a hack or if somebody runs a bot on your wallet....
i lost my OG wallet that i made in 2020 and i would get some juicy airdrop with it
The hackers get to claim all future airdrops from all the hard work that they put in.
This is why I believe a hardware wallet is a must to protect against seed phrase exploits.
Though it is not completely foolproof, as we still can sign a malicious transaction that drains our wallet.
As we grow our footprint, we need to build up a defensive plan to protect it too.
And to become truly reputable, we need to display this key skill:
Onchain and social reputation are built through judgment
In this sea of noise, what you don’t do or say is more important than what you actually say or do.
Taste is your moat as a human
The death of the average.
We are currently witnessing the total collapse of the marginal cost of creation. Copywriting, design, video editing - skills that previously commanded a premium due to the barrier of technical execution are being democratised to the point of
There are so many opportunities right now. We build our reputation by becoming a beacon of signal to filter out the right ones that suit our unique circumstances.
And if you’d like to get my raw, unfiltered takes to cut through the noise, join my new channel on Telegram here .
Because we share a certain worldview publicly, others who resonate with it will connect with us and what we do.
Sometimes, it’s because they are too scared to say their thoughts out loud.
So instead of choosing to farm everything, it’s now more important to choose those that align most with your beliefs and go hard on them.
Because, not every project is perfect.
There will be those who want to mass extract, and they cook up false promises just to feed on hype (just like Shade Network).
When all they want to do is dump on their ‘loyal community members’.
succinct insiders sent 50M airdrop tokens to cex
apriori insiders claimed 70% of their airdrop
rayls insiders claimed 20% of their airdrop
irys insiders claimed 57% of their airdrop
“team is the new community”
This is why judgment becomes the most important skill to decide what to do or skip.
And this can only be honed by doing and then failing or succeeding instead of staying on the fence.
Attract airdrops instead of chasing them
I want airdrops to come to me automatically, instead of having to mindlessly grind for them.
I want to spend as little hours ‘in the trenches’ and get the highest ROI on my time.
In this age when noise is at an ATH, low-volume but high-impact actions are the alpha:
Doing less yet qualifying for more airdrops.
Which is why I‘m focusing on compounding my reputation as leverage to attract airdrops instead of actively chasing them (and eventually burning out).
I shared more about how I want to achieve this below:
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[The only thing we want from airdrops is freedom]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/the-only-thing-we-want-from-airdrops-is-freedom nIRfOb3rKhns7e43SZoOMon, 05 Jan 2026 15:45:10 GMTStop forcing yourself to farm projects that you hate.
Airdrops aren’t here to make you rich, but they’re a vehicle to make you free.
There’s no need to grind hard to get a $5 million screenshot we can flex, when we can survive perfectly fine with much less.
Freedom is the best airdrop you could ever claim, and these are the 4 types of freedom we achieve:
The freedom to use whatever we want
When I first started with airdrops, I was overwhelmed with information.
There were so many tokenless projects to interact with, until it became yet another job I’m doing.
But we don’t need to force ourselves to use products we hate just to grind for an airdrop.
Instead, we use products we genuinely like and enjoy the process.
While getting surprise airdrops along the way because of our onchain footprint.
If we grind for an airdrop, we place too many expectations on the allocation since we’re spending time on things we hate.
The best airdrops come from products that we’d continue using, even without the incentives.
When we don’t focus too much on the end result (the airdrop allocation):
We don’t force ourselves to use projects we hate.
We don’t stress over limited pre-deposit campaigns that have high competition and burns gas fees.
Because we know there will be other opportunities to make money.
Especially ones that energise us (instead of draining us).
We choose what we want to interact with, and do not FOMO into projects just because they’ll give a good airdrop.
Just like me with perp DEXes because I know I’ll lose too much money.
Time is our most precious asset, so we should only interact with projects that are worth our time.
The freedom to claim whenever we want
Every single TGE follows the same boring story:
Everyone rushes to claim and dump their tokens to take profits.
Linea caused stress for many since the chain was congested, and transactions failed to confirm.
A lot of anger and outrage because they couldn’t claim in time, and the token kept dumping (just like Linea).
We would probably have earned a greater profit if we had joined them and tried to dump our tokens as fast as we can.
But we know that other opportunities will come.
This one airdrop is not the only way to get rich, so we take whatever we can from it and move on to the next one.
The airdrop playbook may seem overdiluted right now, but there are still good plays out there.
Too much noise is on CT, but we can spot these hidden gems by actively curating our feeds (or you can follow my new TG channel to get my unfiltered takes on real signal).
The freedom to write whatever we want
We don’t need to be a slave to the yapper leaderboard, forced to grind out content for rewards.
I’ve seen so many accounts trying hard to maintain their leaderboard position until they run out of things to say about the project.
What’s the point of talking about a project when there’s nothing insightful to add?
It was never more peaceful to create the content you want and like, rather than the one needed from Kaito
Instead, we value our brand more than whatever a project is willing to pay us.
If they can allocate us a certain amount, our earning potential is way higher than that.
We choose to write whatever we want, because we genuinely enjoy learning about that topic and using that product.
No one wants to read content from yet another Kaito dopamine yapper.
But they want to connect with a real human who has authentic thoughts and opinions.
So just be yourself, talk about things you enjoy, and let the algo find others who are interested in your content.
The algo is just a tool for discovery, and it’s the job to find an audience for you.
I don’t want to rely on the algo alone to push out my content, so I’m focused on building a brand that’s algo-proof.
Influence and reputation are the most valuable assets to own today, based on the value we provide.
So I’m focusing on building social capital with valuable content to earn long-term wealth.
The freedom to do whatever we want
Wealth is not for chasing status with flashy cars or yachts.
Wealth ensures that all of our bills and expenses are paid without having to grind a mindless job.
While being able to do whatever we want, whenever we feel like it.
The ability to spend time with our loved ones without worrying about money.
Airdrops are just a tool to build wealth.
And it’s not to flex your allocations and gain clout.
So I choose to see airdrops as not a way to get rich, but to buy my freedom.
One that lets me compound my wealth to give me enough capital to lead the life that I desire.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned in both life and crypto: freedom is the real endgame. It’s not about the number in your portfolio, but about having the flexibility to choose how you spend your days, where you live, and who you work with.
Money is just a tool; never lose sight
This is something that guides me as the end goal of what I’m doing here:
Use my edge to build wealth that gives me freedom.
Learning to say ‘enough is enough’ and be content with what I own, without wanting more.
Day 120: People love themselves the most, yet they value the opinion from others more. I see it constantly—people buying expensive watches, luxury cars, and posting their PNLs (only the wins, of course) just to impress strangers. But what’s the point if your self-worth depends on
Greed has led me to make wrong decisions, so I have to be more aware and control it.
And here’s how I’m aiming to achieve my freedom:
Freedom starts by saying what we did
Real wealth is built slowly, and not with just one trade.
We have to go through multiple failures first to learn what works and what doesn’t.
I position myself for wealth by sharing what I did onchain.
These are the 2 pillars that increase our luck surface area:
Doing: Interacting with any project that I enjoy
Saying: Sharing what I did to amplify my impact
Luck can be engineered when we both say and do, and I shared more about how I’ll achieve this here.
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[2025 was my worst year for airdrops (what didn’t work for me)]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/2025-was-my-worst-year-for-airdrops-what-didnt-work-for-me M9w3eKUoMhZ69amwDp1NThu, 01 Jan 2026 11:37:00 GMT2025 was my worst year for airdrops (what didn’t work for me)
Everyone’s posting their biggest wins of the year, so I’ll do the exact opposite.
We were promised so much, but it has been the most underwhelming year since I started airdrops in 2023.
I’m writing this on the final day of the year to remind myself of all the painful lessons I learnt to refine my strategy in 2026:
Onchain
- Grinding mindless tasks
I still continued with the old strategies that worked well for me in the previous years, including completing Galxe and Layer3 campaigns.
But the returns are getting worse, and they have become huge time sinks.
Sometimes, I’m even forcing myself to interact with projects where the UX is horrible, just to get a token that I’ll dump instantly.
A prime example is Eclipse, where most of the apps were either clones of whatever we could find on Solana or memecoin launchpads/games.
I grew tired of interacting with the ecosystem, and I’m glad that I cut my losses without spending too much time and capital on this L2 (which decided to reward their ‘community’).
Campaigns have turned into a job (but without any guaranteed returns), and most are just a waste of time.
I’ve adopted this mindset when interacting with any project:
If it doesn’t energise me or I’m forced to grind, I will skip it.
Judgment becomes the most important skill to determine which projects are worth interacting with.
- Skipping perp DEX airdrops
Lighter cooked for those who were active, while I earned an amazing 3.9 points.
Trading is not for me, and I’ve barely touched any of the perp DEXes (or even prediction markets for that matter).
It’s no longer the meta of burning fees for points and hoping to get a good return from the airdrop, because everyone else is doing the same actions until the pool gets overdiluted.
I’m skeptical now when every other new airdrop seems to be a perp DEX or a prediction market. Do we really need so many platforms when they essentially perform the same function?
Would someone still use Variational and all the other new DEXes after they gave away their airdrop?
Or maybe, it’s just me being ignorant, and the features they have are not catered to me.
I’m still in the camp that such speculation is gambling, but I plan to learn some strategies to manage my risk better.
Ultimately, I want to make profits first through the platform, and get the airdrop as a bonus.
Relying on just the airdrop alone for profits no longer works.
- Risking funds unnecessarily
2025 was the year of new stablecoins. But no matter how safe they claim to be, there’s always the risk that they would depeg.
Even with all the hype (though likely most could be from InfoFi campaigns), Solstice faced major liquidity issues during the underwhelming presale.
BREAKING: $USX, a synthetic stablecoin on Solana by @solsticefi, briefly depegged to around $0.92 and has not recovered. While the Solstice team says backing and NAV remain unaffected and overcollateralized, calling it a secondary-market liquidity issue with 1:1 redemptions
It’s not worth risking your capital just for an airdrop, and I don’t see a point in interacting with most of these campaigns which follow the same style (points for holding stables and deploying them in DeFi positions).
I still plan to gain some exposure in certain stablecoin airdrops with Pendle YTs , which still have their risks, but at least I’m not risking significant capital.
2025 was also the year of DeFi hacks, with Balancer and Stream Finance being the major ones that affected us.
How the Stream Finance debacle affected the rest of DeFi
\ \ dlnews.com How the Stream Finance debacle affected the rest of DeFi \ \ The collapse of Stream Finance has had a cascading affect on the DeFi ecosystem. One victim, Trevee, explained its own exposure to Steam in a detailed post-mortem. Now, various parties are hiring...](https://t.co/Zb12i9TEJ7)
Multiple platforms had exposure to Stream Finance, and this was a good wake-up call for me on how risky lending platforms like Morpho and Euler can be.
And of course, I lost $13k from a stupid mistake by using Google to find the Plume Portal which led me to a phishing site instead.
It was all because I was using another device to sign my transactions, so the browser history was completely new.
This is the perfect example of how hardware wallets are not completely foolproof, and we can still get hacked by signing malicious transactions.
Though I’d still use them because they protect against seed phrase exploits like what happened during the Trust Wallet hack .
- FOMO-ing without thinking
One of the bigger mistakes I made was deciding to FOMO into football.fun. I thought that because of my background in football, this would be something that I could do well in.
After the hype back in August, I decided to buy player shares when it crashed slightly. But it had gone downhill ever since.
I underestimated the amount of commitment it required, especially to monitor the players’ prices. I’ve lost the motivation to continue checking my players during the different tournaments, and my team is slowly rotting away.
This was a good reminder to research thoroughly into something and ignore all the shills on the timeline before deciding to go into any project.
Though I’m glad I didn’t FOMO into launchpads and barely participated in most of them, as they seem to be underwhelming.
Social
- Choosing not to yap
I am the biggest fool for choosing not to yap when it was so easy to print money during the early stages of InfoFi.
All we needed was to plaster a project’s name on every single tweet and we get a nice fat paycheck when they TGE.
Some have called me stupid for not adapting to the ‘meta’, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk about a project when there’s just nothing much to say.
Till this day, it’s cringe how some are trying to farm engagement while adding a project’s name at the end of the tweet just to increase their mindshare.
I’m choosing to sacrifice short-term profits for long-term wealth, and we’ll see if that was the right decision in a few years’ time.
In this age of infinite content, a trusted personal brand is something that will make you algo-proof and Sybil-proof to continue standing out.
I’d rather be a depth yapper to build out my reputation instead of mindless dopamine yapping that just creates noise.
- Caring too much about views and other vanity metrics
The algo has completely changed from last year, and my views have plummeted.
My follower count has been stagnant for the past 3 months.
No matter how I tell myself to ignore it, the lower metrics have taken a toll on my confidence.
This was the year when I burned out multiple times, as my main motivation was the number of views I’d get.
Virality and dopamine got into my head, and the performance of my previous articles was a good reminder of how unpredictable the algo can be:
These could not even go past my baseline of 10k views, while my most recent article received 50k views.
There’s no way to know how the algo or my followers would react to any of my content, unless I post it.
And the only way to stop caring about the performance of one piece of content is to post it, and then move on to focus on the next one instead.
That’s why I believe in finding a way to capture ideas so that we’ll never be stuck at staring at a blank screen, wondering what to write next.
Instead of focusing too much on views, I’m looking for resonance with my audience.
If what I write makes a reader feel something, I have achieved my goal.
Others will remember how you make them feel. And I’d rather have a strong connection with a smaller group than to have a weak connection with thousands of followers who would forget me easily.
- Using generic images for my articles
I wanted to save time and use a template for my article header images, because I believed that the content would be good enough to get others to read more.
But this could have led to others on the timeline ignoring my new articles, because the cover image looks exactly the same as the one they just read.
While it takes up more time, I’m looking to adopt some of the minimalistic elements from @visualizevalue to summarise my article in a simple graphic.
Two Choices
This has varying results so far, but I’ll continue refining the ideation and execution process to create graphics that can capture attention.
- Not telling more stories and sharing more failures
With how toxic CT can be, I was scared of sharing my stories here.
As an airdrop account, I was pressured to only share my wins, because everyone else seems to get massive wins with every airdrop.
Why would they follow me if I keep failing?
But my mindset changed when I decided to share a bit of lore about my username.
I thought others would judge me, but the responses was encouraging as my audience got to know more about me.
Of course, there will be those who still call me a ‘loser’ since I keep failing.
But no one is perfect, and sharing failures actually help others to trust your wins more.
Instead of those who share their wins, which may not even be true.
- Not connecting with my audience more
I haven’t checked my notifications for weeks, as I’m still slowly recovering from yet another round of CT burnout.
Sorry btw if I haven’t replied you yet, please shoot me a DM if there are any questions you still have.
In 2026, I’ll be looking to strengthen my connection with my audience, especially those who have been with me since I started on CT.
I co-hosted my first Spaces with @0xbeiu, and it was nice to see the encouraging turnout for our chat.
Connection with my audience will be the key to staying algo-proof, and there’s so much we can build through just text alone (which is why audio and even video are areas that I want to explore).
We’re looking to do more of these in the future as a bi-weekly event, and let us know if there are any topics that you’d like to discuss.
General
- Wasting time
I wonder how many weeks I’ve wasted this year, scrolling mindlessly on the timeline and justifying that I’m finding alpha while consuming noisy content.
Time is our most valuable asset because it can never be earned back, and I’m looking to be more intentional with how I spend it.
I’ve successfully kicked the habit of constantly checking my notifications, and I want to reduce the amount of time I spend on Twitter and other social apps.
That’s why curating our feed becomes so important to remove noise, and I’m glad that the timeline is healing with more long-form content being shared now.
- Comparing with others
This has caused me a lot of unnecessary stress, and I’ve wasted so much time thinking about others.
There will always be someone better than you:
Someone grows their follower count faster than you
Someone gets a higher airdrop allocation even when they put in less effort
If we compare with others, we will never be happy.
Even if we get a good win, we’ll see others doing even better than us and that spoils the entire mood.
But everyone is running their own race, and the only person we should compare with is our past self.
You’re going to be bombarded with recaps and humble bragging this time of the year.
Just remember, we're all running our own race with different starting points. Sometimes, simply surviving what life throws at you is major win.
I would be most worried if my growth was stagnant, so I would aim towards learning and honing my judgment to get better at airdrops
- Not using metrics to drive my decisions
I’m horrible at maths and numbers, so data is not something that I enjoy looking at the most.
But with AI making it easier to analyse and gather insights, this is one change that I aim to make for 2026:
Look at data to gain a clearer picture on the projects that I’m interacting (or want to interact) with.
There’s only so much information we can get from CT. It’s possible that the data that is posted here may not even be true, and I want to be more proactive in finding these sources myself to make my own decisions.
What worked for me
While it seems like such a depressing year, there are still positives to take with me into 2026:
- Choosing to write long-form
I made a commitment to writing long-form every week, and that has helped me to gain more clarity in airdrops.
While I’ve stopped writing guides (which I’m doubting their effectiveness), I’ve realised the need to express my opinions more, which will help me stand out from the masses.
I’ve seen many accounts posting the same airdrop updates, and all of them will become commoditised by AI (because they can pump out such content at scale).
Long-form is still the best way to build trust, because it adds depth to our ideas and those who resonate will see the true value in them.
- Building a reputation
2025 marked a turning point in how I viewed airdrops, especially after reading Vitalik’s post on why reputation will be so important.
Airdrops are essentially a war against Sybils, where low-value actions are ignored because they are replicated at scale by Sybils until they lose their meaning.
And in 2026, I’m going all in on building a unique reputation for myself. Not just as the typical airdrop guide creator, but someone who’s able to filter out the noise and spot the best opportunities.
I’ve seen how both my onchain and social footprint have helped me qualify for different airdrops, including MegaETH’s allocation (even though I barely talked about them here).
And if you believe in the same principle, then the easiest way is just to say what you did onchain.
2026 is a new start
2025 was a crazy year, with Trump and all the noise from InfoFi.
But I see 2026 as the year for healing, as platforms start to combat noise and the focus goes back to revenue instead of all those projects that generate hype but disappear after TGE.
It has been a tough year for me, and I hope that it was better for you.
But thank you to all who have been through this journey with me, and 2026 will be our year.
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[Questioning why I’m still here after 2 years]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/questioning-why-im-still-here-after-2-years ljsyXxdf28ieAcHZyMU3Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:05:54 GMT2025 has been the weirdest year.
We were promised so much because of Trump’s presidency, but the markets have been abysmal.
We believed that Hyperliquid would change airdrops by giving more to the community, but no other project followed their direction.
We’re exhausted by the constant slop in our replies, and CT no longer gives us any alpha.
This space has undeniably given me big opportunities for wealth. But at times like this, it makes me truly wonder:
Why am I still here?
Is there any hope for crypto, or even for airdrops?
I’ve become increasingly jaded with this space, and took the longest break from CT since 2023.
There are many reasons why 2025 will mark a turning point for airdrops/crypto and my time here:
Airdrops are no longer fun
When someone asks me what new airdrop is there to do, I struggle to answer:
There’s nothing that interests me right now.
Every other new app is either a perp DEX or prediction market, and I’m fighting a losing battle since I suck at both.
Of course, that’s a skill issue on my part. But I don’t like the direction of everything becoming a casino.
Other projects are just doing the same old boring points and InfoFi campaigns that have been repeated to death.
All because it ‘worked before’ and they choose to incentivise short-term behaviours for attention instead of building something meaningful.
And there’s nothing exciting to do with their apps either.
Most projects are giving out ‘peanut’ allocations (because some teams are Sybiling their own airdrop too).
Airdrop farming in 2025:
Onchain actions are getting devalued because they’re so easy to automate, and projects are choosing to reward yappers with higher allocations.
We’re all stuck in the same cycle of farming something new, getting the token, and then dumping and moving on to the next one.
And it’s all because of the way this industry works:
There’s no reason to hold any token
How many TGEs have been riddled with controversies and drama this year?
How many presales have flopped and caused investors to make a loss?
It’s amazing how ‘mistakes’ can still be made today, even with all the past failures.
Simply put, we messed up
While the website was under heavy load, many users were not able to claim at the exact TGE time, while some others (mainly Legion users) could. For a more detailed post on what happened see the post below.
This isn't the launch experience we wanted to
Claim Delays, Wallet Deployment Issues & System Instability
Today’s airdrop claim event encountered two primary issues that affected the user experience: a delayed claim window and failures in wallet creation. Below is a clear breakdown of what happened, why it happened, how it
Don’t teams ever learn? I’ve become disillusioned with every new token launch because they all follow the same pattern.
So many have introduced different mechanisms or changes to their tokenomics as a ‘novel’ way of rewarding the community, but nothing seems to work:
All of them still bleed to zero eventually.
@Zeneca’s article summed up perfectly how I feel right now:
Most tokens don’t underperform because the tech is bad, they underperform because they create a market where the rational trade is to sell.
If you wonder why CT is so depressed, well this is because most alts are trading significantly below FTX bankruptcy lows.
I checked top200 tokens 3yrs ago & vs. where they are trading now:
- Median perf. in USD: -58%
- Median perf. in BTC: -92%
Brutal...
Others are blatantly scamming their community because they can get away without any repercussions.
succinct insiders sent 50M airdrop tokens to cex
apriori insiders claimed 70% of their airdrop
rayls insiders claimed 20% of their airdrop
irys insiders claimed 57% of their airdrop
“team is the new community”
And those who overhype and ultimately underdeliver still have second chances to scam again.
Dude committed crimes of the century, fucked over his community, employees, everyone who believed in him, and put the org in a terrible situation, and now has the audacity to start his own fund.
We, as an industry, really need to stop rewarding this behavior. Rushi should be in
EXCLUSIVE: After Movement Labs exit, Rushi Manche unveils Nyx Group venture with $100 million plan to back token projects theblock.co/post/382166/ru…
We’re sold the dream that ‘it’ll be better this time’, but almost every project is suffering the same fate now.
Even the most loyal community member would be challenged on their conviction to hold when everything else except crypto seems to keep going up.
And it doesn’t help that we’re overwhelmed by negativity everywhere:
We’re burnt out by dopamine overload
Overstimulation plagues our lives.
We’re taught to be ‘in the trenches’ if we want to be successful on CT.
So we constantly scroll on the timeline, looking for the next alpha, when we’re consuming a ton of noise instead.
Slop is everywhere, rage bait is everywhere.
I think I've reached my breaking point with X.
Nothing but ai slop replies to my posts.
Nothing but ai slop replies to the tweets on my timeline.
No intelligent discussion to be found.
Everyone knows the secret to getting more views:
Create drama, even when there’s no hard evidence. Because ragebait always wins.
I find it hard to believe this is the formula
I've tried creating lots of high-quality content
I've tried responding quickly and providing value to large accounts
I've tried sending rapid mass replies
Nothing has worked
Yesterday, I used rage-bait on some videos by replying
Others are larping and coming up with oversensationalised stories because there’s no way to verify their claims.
Kindly stop larping with your bs slop articles.
-The entirety of CT
Cheap dopamine hits fill the timeline, and the overstimulation is slowly killing our ability to think.
That’s what the social media platforms want us to become:
Mindless scrollers who become mentally obese because we are overloaded with information, but take zero action.
But amidst all this doom and gloom, nature is starting to heal:
Things are changing for the better
The timeline wants you to believe that crypto is dead because negativity sells more.
And I’ve been a sucker for it too because that’s all I’m consuming here.
During these tough times, I’ve lost the motivation to continue writing:
There are no projects that are interesting to interact with and document anymore
My views have gone down (and it’s affected me, no matter how I try not to let it)
I’ve taken multiple breaks from CT this month alone because it was just so depressing.
I didn’t feel like opening up the app at all because all I’ll see is another engagement farming post.
But as the famous saying goes:
Bear markets are the best time to build.
They are mentally torturing, but it forces us to constantly question ourselves:
Why are we still here, doing things that may not yield any return?
I’ve asked myself this multiple times, before finding the answer:
I want to achieve freedom with airdrops.
This will be my North Star to guide every single action I take (including choosing to skip certain projects).
Yes, it’s harder to do airdrops now. Competition is rising every day, with every action now being replicated at scale with automation.
And it will get worse once we become fully mainstream.
But this space still has the potential, we just have to find our edge.
I see reputation as my edge, because it’s something that can’t be easily replicated.
Amidst all the noise, there are still plenty of opportunities. And sometimes, we just have to be patient.
Slowly increasing our luck surface area until we are fully positioned when the right opportunity comes.
More importantly, our North Star has to be something that we enjoy doing.
Otherwise, we would lose the motivation and stop doing these actions completely.
And right now, the real way to keep our motivation is by doing less:
The alpha is low-volume, high-impact actions
In this world of abundance, less is more.
Being constantly online is no longer something to be proud of.
The real flex is being able to spend as little time here as possible while still getting the highest ROI.
Not just on profits, but on time too.
Time is the most precious asset that you own, because it can never be earned back.
So instead of looking to grind every single opportunity (that will likely give a poor return):
We have to become more selective with what we interact with.
We have to enjoy what we’re doing.
We have to find ways of standing out to beat the competition.
Moving forward to 2026, these are the principles that will guide me to freedom with airdrops:
Value time above anything else
Hone judgment to protect time and capital
Optimise every action for value to stand out
Ignore vanity metrics
Trust nothing unless it’s verifiable
Avoid noise and dopamine like the plague
Play the long-term game, even at the expense of quick cash grabs
Create a lifestyle that is truly enjoyable
Build a reputation based on trust
The game will always change, but what matters most is how we adapt to the new rules.
And how I aim to be both Sybil-proof and algo-proof is by becoming a Signal Creator, as I shared below:
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[To win at airdrops, study the Sybil war]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/to-win-at-airdrops-study-the-sybil-war 3PIOVFxQsg6gcG4YGeIcTue, 09 Dec 2025 12:37:24 GMTAirdrops are an arms race.
Projects use stricter criteria. Sybil farms find new ways to exploit them. And real users lose out in this never-ending war.
Sybils are the only reason why airdrops are so hard right now:
Farms will always find methods to game incentives and dilute the rewards for real users.
So Sybils need to be eliminated and we need to learn how to stand out from them.
After listening to @DrNickA’s talk, I have a clearer indication of how I can become Sybil resistant.
Here’s how to future-proof your airdrop strategy and stay Sybil-resistant:
Understanding Sybils
Here’s a simple definition of a Sybil attack:
A single entity pretending to be multiple identities to game a reputation system for gain.
In the case of airdrops:
Sybils pretend to be real users who are eligible for tokens with the aim of dumping their allocation immediately.
This is a problem for projects because it dilutes the allocation given to genuine users, while the price of the token will tank with all the selling pressure.
That’s why projects are becoming smarter, and they are using more methods to identify and eliminate Sybils from their airdrop distribution.
But Sybil farms are evolving too, and it leads to this undesirable outcome:
The Sybil war is an escalation game
There are 2 parties who will constantly try to outdo each other:
Projects will keep coming up with new criteria to outsmart Sybils
Sybil farms will create new strategies to bypass Sybil filtering
This leads to an arms race where Sybil resistant systems need to keep evolving to stay ahead of the Sybil farms.
We’ve seen this with other systems apart from airdrops:
Bots and fake accounts have led to Web2 systems using advanced verification systems to eliminate multiple accounts.
Real humans experience increased friction when creating or even logging into their accounts:
Phone number verification before creating a Gmail account
We have to solve complex CAPTCHAs before creating a Twitter account
Liveness detection before using apps
We’ve seen the same for Web3 anti-Sybil protocols:
In the early days of Gitcoin Passport, we just needed an aged GitHub account, but now the criteria are stricter.
Now, we have to prove that we’re a regular contributor with commits on ≥ 30 days.
Monad also mentioned this in their airdrop criteria:
Transaction count, which was a criterion for Arbitrum, is no longer useful.
Wallets with high transaction counts but providing low economic value will now be filtered out.
As anti-Sybil measures escalate, Sybil farms try to find ways of outsmarting them.
Possibly to the point of real humans being eliminated completely.
Some of these protocols try to ‘filter’ out Sybils by getting them to mint an NFT for a certain amount.
But it’s pointless to get rid of Sybils with a financial barrier since they’d still mint it if it makes financial sense (when the reward is more than the cost).
And it just gives the anti-Sybil protocol more revenue.
Others have used Binance KYC as the main scoring for proving humanity, but that can be gamed too:
Sybils can’t be fought with biometrics or PoH
Proof of Humanity alone is not good enough.
Once World’s system is used for more reward distributions (apart from just the WLD stimmy):
Bad actors will start farming humans for their eyeballs.
They could kidnap others with the sole purpose of scanning their eyeballs to get their credentials.
While there’s nothing as scary as that happening right now, we’ve seen other forms of farming humans:
It’s so easy to buy KYC credentials, especially from less developed countries where that ‘small’ fee could cover their daily expenses.
We just needed $2 to buy a Persona KYC, which is not a huge sum for someone who wants to game the system.
KYC or Proof of Humanity alone is no longer a good enough indicator that an individual is deserving of an airdrop.
Even with multiple rounds of PoH, Linea still had to perform another round of Sybil filtering.
So if we’re just relying on proving identities for airdrops, this can be easily gamed.
AI might get so good that it fakes these credentials and pose as a real human.
But here’s a better option:
Authentic human identities are the answer
LayerZero performed one of the most intense Sybil witch hunts. This involved:
But not many projects would go to such lengths to identify and eliminate Sybils from their user pool.
So another method is to filter for authentic human identities.
In this age where everything can be replicated:
The Web of Trust is the endgame.
Trust is based on reputation, or the amount of value that you’ve provided to others.
It’s hard for Sybils to enter this Web of Trust because no one knows who they are until they prove themselves.
That’s why Kaito is based on a social graph:
Who you know is more important than how many followers you have.
Your reputation and standing improve when more ‘Smart Followers’ follow you.
A Sybil account can have tons of followers, but they are meaningless if no credible account follows them.
Though this system can be broken too, with known engagement farmers being part of this ‘Inner Circle’ too.
Which is why we need more than one signal to prove someone’s humanity:
Onchain and social are the important pillars
What makes a human unique is a multi-factor of signals that goes beyond just IDs and KYC.
That way, it’s harder to manipulate an identity as compared to relying on just one system.
Which is why combining both social and onchain reputation together is more ideal than just relying on one alone:
Social proves that others see you as valuable
Onchain proves that you actually did what you said (skin in the game)
Combining social and onchain reputation provides more signal in proving the authenticity of a human.
I’ve seen many declare that onchain airdrops are dead, but I see our onchain activity as the foundation of trust:
How can you be a credible person by just yapping mindlessly about every project without even using the product?
Your guides will be surface-level because you don’t use the product and just summarise the documentation.
People will realise that your content is no longer valuable and will ignore you.
Even though it seems like many projects seem to love anyone who yaps about a project:
Onchain will still play a crucial role.
Some projects just want to chase vanity metrics so they won’t look at onchain ones (and these are the campaigns that I’ll avoid).
And if you’re here for the long-term (like me), your reputation is more valuable than any random InfoFi campaign.
Build reputation by giving value
Reputation can’t be gamed by Sybils or fake identities, because it has to be earned.
Projects will no longer throw money at farmers and hope they are converted into long-term users.
Since this allocates more rewards to Sybils instead of real users.
Monad shared how they only wanted to reward:
Power users of major mainnet blockchains
Individuals who care deeply about crypto (social graph)
How many airdrops we qualify for in the future depends on the reputation we hold.
And there’s no need to game any system either, and just be your authentic self:
Interact with protocols that you enjoy using (instead of farming)
Talk about topics that you truly enjoy (instead of whatever pays you the most)
Build a strong social and onchain reputation that proves that you’re a high-value individual and projects can’t help to allocate you tokens.
I shared my strategy for this here .
If you are tired of burning out by grinding mindlessly for airdrops, there is another way. To earn rewards automatically just by being yourself, build a reputation that compounds by joining the 30-Day Signal Creator Challenge.
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[50% of CT hates me, and that’s perfectly fine]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/50percent-of-ct-hates-me-and-thats-perfectly-fine DnT2VvOQpZbqL3PQvBfuMon, 01 Dec 2025 13:12:37 GMTYou’re too scared of being disliked, and that’s killing your growth on CT.
I received hate for sharing my opinions on airdrops, but I don’t regret it.
While being polarising means that half the world dislikes me, I’m attracting the right people who resonate the most.
Here’s why I’m no longer afraid of sharing my thoughts online (even when I’ll get toxic comments):
Opinions make you stand out
AI is great at spitting out facts.
And if you’re doing the exact same, AI will outperform you because they can pump out content at a larger scale.
Purely informational content is useless in this age of infinite content.
The generic ‘how-to’ guides no longer work when everyone else can write the exact same ones as you.
Or the ‘BREAKING’ tweets where everyone rushes to be the first one who breaks the news and receive the most engagement.
Which AI can publish at a faster pace than what’s humanly impossible.
That’s why brand accounts or the typical KOL get barely any engagement because they have zero personality.
While accounts with the most engagement are always personal accounts, especially those with a strong opinion.
This was exactly the concern that one of my members in the 30-Day Signal Creator Challenge had:
Why would someone follow me if AI can write the same thing?
They will only follow you if they feel that they resonate with you.
This is done by sharing your authentic opinions:
Through all of your experiences in life, you will develop a perspective on the topics you write about.
It’s even better if you have a contrarian view about the topic you write about, because it helps you stand out.
But my advice is having these contrarian beliefs only because you truly believe in them, and not for the sake of believing in them.
Here are some of my opinions on airdrops that are different from others:
Airdrops will never be fair and someone will always lose
There’s no point in complaining because it clouds your judgment
We need both onchain and social reputation to get future airdrops
Grinding and farming airdrops is the wrong approach because it burns you out
You need a hardware wallet for airdrops to protect your onchain footprint
But because our takes are different from the status quo, we will meet nasty comments:
50% will hate you
I tried pleasing everyone with my content, but eventually realised it’s pointless.
It felt so fake to me when trying to talk about POVs that I don’t agree with, just because they’re popular.
And that led me to share more of my true opinions online, with some of them being contrarian takes.
I used to get so affected by all the toxic comments on my posts, but I’ve learnt to manage them better:
There’s no point trying to convince those people that we’re right.
They have their opinion, and I’m wasting my time trying to convince them of mine.
Especially if they’re overly emotional, as that clouds their judgment.
I’ve followed the same path to just mute all the toxic accounts and move on.
In the case of airdrops, there are many ways to get rich.
My strategy is not perfect, and I will look like a fool to those who are printing 4-5 figures through their methods.
And I have met my fair share of emotional labels:
Project bootlicker (before Kaito became a craze)
Idiot for not yapping mindlessly (I don’t want to lose trust)
A hater of airdrop farmers (I don’t hate them, I just think grinding is a lost cause)
Our opinions are based on our experiences.
When we share them online, we share the lens through which we view the world, which will either be the same or different from others.
We will have haters because someone strongly disagrees with how we view the world (because they have different experiences from us).
But I would ignore them completely and focus on these instead:
50% will love you
The other 50% will love your content and feel like you’re speaking their thoughts out loud.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and while we focus too much on the negativity:
There will be others who agree completely with you.
Some would even help to defend you when you’re being attacked (it’s happened to me multiple times):
I used to care too much about the negative comments and get overly anxious about them.
But I’ve learnt to mute them and move on.
Instead, I’m focusing on building the relationship with my real audience:
Those who would spread our opinions for us
Those who actively seek out our content
Those who binge all of our content in one sitting
The ultimate hack happens when your audience spreads your message without you having to beg for RTs and likes.
They resonate so strongly with your opinions that they’ll continue spreading your message.
We build a trusted audience because we’re doing this:
You have to make enemies
Enemies are the prerequisite to a cult-like audience:
One that follows us because they like us, regardless of the topic that we talk about.
To create a strong bond with our audience, we need to have a common enemy.
One that forms an ‘Us vs Them’ mentality and gives us a shared vision.
I have tons of enemies when establishing my brand:
Kaito yappers
Airdrop farmers
And those who are against these enemies will naturally resonate strongly with my content.
Don’t become another yapper
So many accounts are too scared of sharing their thoughts online, especially when it comes to projects on yapper leaderboards:
They are too scared that if they share their honest opinions, they will lose their rankings.
Projects are at fault too because some disincentivise you from sharing critical feedback about them.
This comes as a dilemma for most creators:
Share their honest opinions about the project and risk losing their rankings
Only shill the project and lose trust with their audience
#1 may cause you to lose short-term cash, but you maintain trust with your audience.
Which is an even more valuable asset to own.
Your audience values real opinions and not ones that you’re paid to post.
In this trust recession, accounts with the most trust will build long-term wealth.
And here’s one more benefit of having an opinion:
You churn out content without sounding like AI slop
If you ask AI to write an article on how to earn $100k from airdrops, it will pump out generic advice.
But after adding more context through our experiences and opinions:
AI sees the topic through your lens and can be more specific in the content it creates.
AI is great at amplifying ideas, but they need to come from us first.
I’m using AI to generate more ideas based on the current long-form pieces that I’ve written by myself.
With my library of content, AI will come up with more specific posts because it knows my world view and writing style.
So it won’t churn out the typical slop that so many would instantly mute.
Stop being neutral and start developing taste
We stand out by having an opinion, not by being yet another NPC that’s neutral.
Don’t be afraid of hate, because it will always be there (and you can always mute them).
So choose to go hard on your beliefs, and you’ll naturally build a cult-like audience around your brand.
Others won’t follow you based on the amount of information you give.
Because AI will provide more information than you ever could.
Instead, they follow you because of your taste:
You think for yourself instead of letting others (or the algo) dictate your worldview.
You have a point of view to navigate the sea of noise and identify signal.
So use that to your advantage and stand out from AI.
Give people a reason to follow you instead of becoming ‘just another account’.
The path to achieve this is to become a Signal Creator, as I shared here .
If you are tired of burning out by grinding mindlessly for airdrops, there is another way.
To earn rewards just by being yourself, build a reputation that compounds by joining the 30-Day Signal Creator Challenge.
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[The fundamental problem with airdrops (that no one wants to admit)]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/the-fundamental-problem-with-airdrops-that-no-one-wants-to-admit fFRGSm8Vl6nTb9DJz4BkMon, 24 Nov 2025 13:55:34 GMTEveryone keeps asking why airdrops feel worse this cycle, and the answer is simple:
Projects are rewarding engagement instead of alignment.
Airdrops are no longer fun. They’ve become a predictable game that we grind for and get a result that we’re massively disappointed with.
Airdrops have changed since the
And misaligned incentives are the single reason why we’re in this current limbo for airdrops:
Incentives drive behaviour
Taking from Charlie Munger’s famous quote:
Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome
Which, in airdrop terms, translates to:
Tell me how you measure my value to your ecosystem, and I’ll show you how I behave
People will optimise their behaviours around the reward, including ones that the projects never wanted to reward in the first place.
If they choose to reward a certain metric, humans will exploit any loophole to maximise their returns on it.
It’s just like those ‘new account promos’ we get for creating an account with any Web2 app.
They will start referring their friends and family, or even creating accounts for them to maximise the amount of promos they get.
Humans are incentive-driven, so anyone can cultivate certain behaviours by giving us a reward to do it.
Just like how my country is giving out $50 to walk different trails.
The same applies to airdrops:
What teams choose to reward shapes:
The type of user they attract
The quality of the ecosystem they build
And this is what happens when the incentives are misaligned:
Airdrops reward the wrong actions
Not all airdrops are doing this, but some reward actions that build short-term hype.
And in the process, they sacrifice long-term growth.
This happens when projects choose to reward actions that let them capture the most attention.
Likely, because their product is just not good enough.
Incentives are used to compensate for the lack of usefulness.
Just like how some content creators use giveaways to give a quick boost to their views and follower count.
They’re effectively throwing money at users with the airdrop and hoping that they’ll stay, but many would leave once there are no more incentives.
Low-value actions start being rewarded, including:
Completing simple social tasks (likes, RTs, and follows) to boost engagement
Spamming messages on Discord to grind roles
Giving a list of simple onchain tasks to complete as campaigns
Doing random transactions on their testnet
Because the barrier to entry is so low:
These misaligned incentives attract mercenary behaviour.
Farmers show up, complete a few tasks, claim the airdrop, and leave.
If they don’t get the reward they expected, then they’ll start being toxic too .
Projects get a nice bump in their metrics, but they eventually die off once the incentives dry up.
Just like what happened to Taiko when their Trailblazer campaign ended.
The same also applies to InfoFi airdrops:
Projects announce an allocation to yappers
Yappers grind out the leaderboard for rankings
They claim and dump the rewards at the end of the season
No one talks about them on the timeline anymore
InfoFi awards attention, and not value.
Attention without trust is not valuable, but most projects reward pure attention alone.
Yappers don’t talk about what they believe in, they talk about the project that pays them the most.
All we need to do is look at projects that held yapper campaigns but are no longer distributing rewards.
Who talks about them now, except for the random paid KOL shill?
Story
Berachain
Magic Newton
Novastro
Caldera
The list goes on and on.
But that’s not the only way to conduct an airdrop:
Incentives reveal what the team actually cares about
Whatever the project communicates on the timeline can be taken with a grain of salt.
Some of them make claims just to be popular or build up hype:
“We value the community”
“We want to play long-term games”
“We are not here to farm users”
But the incentives reveal their true goals, based on the type of campaigns that they run.
A great post by @0xDezman summarises this point very well:
Are projects attracting missionaries or mercenaries?
The rewards determine the type of users they attract, which is either:
Mercenaries who fake alignment to get rewards
Missionaries who truly believe in the project and are durable users of the product
Yes, projects face a tough job in differentiating between the two and identifying their true, loyal fans.
But if the incentives are designed to reward vanity metrics or short-term attention, they will attract more mercenaries than missionaries.
Which is why I have no motivation to interact with any project with a yapper leaderboard.
Most choose this ‘easy’ way out to use metrics that can be quantified easily, but there are other ways to identify and reward missionaries too:
Airdrops can reward the right behaviours
Time and time again, I’ve seen complaints about how they did “X, Y, and Z” but were ineligible for the airdrop.
Of course, all of us would claim that our contributions are valuable to the project.
Who would admit otherwise?
So it’s up to the project to define what the most valuable actions are to them.
Or what actions signal the greatest conviction and alignment with their product.
Just like how every project can customise its yapper leaderboard to reward the ‘right’ behaviours.
Some key points from @Punk9277’s article that mentioned some indicators of incentivised alignment:
ICO participation
TVL commitments
Holding community NFTs
Visible social advocacy
Incentives have to encourage high-value, meaningful contributions, and they must involve cost.
Otherwise, anyone (including mercenaries) can do these actions and get the same rewards as long-term believers.
And that’s why I still believe this type of airdrop rewards alignment the most:
The best airdrops come when the incentives are not known
When no rewards are announced beforehand, there is less farming.
There won’t be zero farming, but it’s less attractive for Sybil farms to spam a protocol when there are no incentives.
Airdrops used to be fun because they were like surprise rewards that we got from interacting with the project.
But this joy has been killed by projects that actively shill their incentives to attract users or yappers.
One look at Kaito Earn, where it’s basically telling you to yap about multiple projects at once.
Cookie does the same thing, where they’re just inviting others to yap for rewards, and not those who truly believe in them.
Airdrops with known criteria are boring because everyone knows how to farm them.
That’s how they become overfarmed and eventually overdiluted.
That’s why I still like retroactive airdrops the best:
No rewards are announced beforehand, so only genuine users would interact
No public criteria, which reduces mass farming
Retroactive airdrops force me to only interact with projects that I truly enjoy using (and can make profits with).
And not ones that I’m forcing myself to grind for rewards and eventually burning out.
Real, durable users get rewarded for their contributions, and they are more likely to stay because their efforts are recognised.
Airdrops are never random
User behaviours are a direct result of the incentive structure that the team designed, whether it’s intentional or not.
That’s why I’m focusing on projects that value high-quality and high-intent behaviours, instead of optimising for short-term hype.
There’s an abundance of opportunities out there in the space, with most just being noise or PvP games that are meant to extract from us.
So it’s up to us to identify the highest-ROI opportunities based on our time and capital constraints.
Judgment becomes the most valuable skill to become successful with airdrops
Get weekly strategies on becoming a Signal Creator that attracts rewards with a strong onchain and social footprint.
If you are tired of mindless grinding for airdrops, build a reputation that compounds (instead of burning out), and earn rewards just by being yourself:
Join the 30-Day Signal Creator Challenge here.
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[Read this if you’re tired of KOLs stealing your airdrops]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/read-this-if-youre-tired-of-kols-stealing-your-airdrops uitvgdPwr5cIWWKJLlrBTue, 18 Nov 2025 15:07:05 GMTYou’re losing airdrops not because you’re unlucky, but because you’re playing a rigged game.
The same scenario plays out every single time:
You get nothing while KOLs are flexing their max allocations.
No matter how much effort you put in, there’s nothing to show for.
Instead of complaining when insiders ‘win again’, focus on value creation to stand out from 99% of other crypto users.
These are the 3 mindset shifts I use to earn airdrops without being a KOL:
The game will never, ever be fair
There will always be someone ahead of you.
Even those who you think deserve it less than you.
And when the allocation checker comes out, it feels like the project hates you.
You did X, Y, and Z.
Another wallet only did A.
KOLs with practically zero onchain activity get in, even when they’re promoting scams.
So why is it that they were eligible but you aren’t?
The game will always be rigged against you.
Especially if you have no insider info and are just someone who’s trying to find their footing here.
That’s the reality that we have to accept, or we’ll continue blaming everything else except ourselves.
I’ve resigned to the fact that I will never get into the cabal to extract as much as possible.
But that’s perfectly fine.
My goal is not to make millions of dollars in a year:
I just need to make enough from crypto to live a content and comfortable life.
And I’m building this with a mindset shift:
Focus on what you can control
We have absolutely zero control over the outcome.
There is no way that we’ll know the allocation we receive for the effort that we put in.
And because we have no control, we get frustrated when the outcome does not meet our expectations.
But instead, I’m focusing on the inputs:
What projects do I choose to interact with
How much effort do I put into interacting with them (both onchain and social)
Time is our ultimate enemy, and every action we take has to optimise for time.
That’s why judgment becomes the key factor in airdrops:
We need to interact with projects that give the best ROI based on our time and capital constraints.
I will cover every base on the projects that I have conviction in.
This leads me to miss multiple airdrops, especially those ‘easy wins’ where you just have to yap mindlessly.
But that’s fine, because all we need is one good drop.
There will always be other opportunities, and it’s all about positioning for them.
And it doesn’t help when we’re doing this either:
Comparing with others destroys your mental health
It sucks that everyone else seems to be winning, except for you.
They’re all flexing their wins while you have nothing to show for.
Many were wondering why some accounts received certain MegaETH allocations while they got nothing.
But that’s besides the point:
Comparing with others just kills our mental health:
There will always be someone who does better than we do.
So instead, I’m comparing against myself and finding ways to refine my strategy for future airdrops and presales.
The exact same thing happened when ZKsync’s airdrop was out:
Many claimed it was an ‘influencer’ airdrop because many big accounts got the max allocation.
Which is funny since there was no way of connecting the social account to a user’s wallet at that time.
I received multiple negative comments because I shared my Wenser stats and some said that they had better stats than me and received nothing.
The timeline was full of negative emotions, but I still stick to the fact that the TWAB criterion was easy to hit.
Negative emotions lead to poor judgment, so I’m cutting out all comparisons.
The time spent wondering what others are doing is wasted.
Instead, focus on this principle:
Give value first to receive value
The days of vanity metrics are over.
Airdrops and presales no longer care about how many transactions you did or followers you have.
Anyone can game these metrics, except for value:
Projects are looking to find the most aligned individuals to allocate their tokens to.
And not those who would dump immediately upon claiming.
So we have to prove that we deserve these allocations by giving value.
The projects get to decide what are the most valuable contributions and will reward them accordingly.
Farming no longer works because we’re just spamming multiple low-value wallets that get filtered out.
So it’s all about building a strong reputation.
You can either give up or take action
Of course, it’s ‘easy’ for me to say all of this because I got an allocation from MegaETH.
But I will continue to say this even if I were ineligible.
I’ve had my fair share of failures before getting the MegaETH allocation:
Not signing the Hyperliquid Terms of Use
Ineligible for Monad, even with a decently strong footprint
My point is that this is the new reality of airdrops:
It is impossible to get every single one, and there’ll be plenty of failures along the way.
You could choose to quit and complain about your fate, or continue playing this game the smarter way.
It will always be rigged against you, because the KOLs will always be favoured.
But instead of being yet another engagement farmer on the timeline:
Look to provide real value to others and receive value in return.
But I am not by any means a KOL.
My growth has stagnated considerably, and I barely earn any Yaps.
I started from literally nothing in 2023 to reach this state (and it’s far from my full potential).
You could either complain that you need connections to get airdrops now, or start building a high-value profile that attracts these connections.
It’s all about positioning yourself in the best way to take advantage of every new opportunity:
I do this by saying what I did onchain.
I try new things and document both my actions and results to build credibility.
The future of airdrops and presales belongs to those with a strong social and onchain footprint.
And I’m building both as a Signal Creator .
If you are tired of mindless grinding for airdrops, build a reputation that compounds (instead of burning out), and earn rewards just by being yourself:
Join the 30-Day Signal Creator Challenge here.
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[17 Airdrop Opportunities In 5 Minutes — Insider Roundup #138]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/insider-roundup-138 q6CihvpJjTvni9H0VtFsMon, 17 Nov 2025 02:59:49 GMT Tweet Roundup
Discover the best airdrop tips I posted on Twitter this week:
Confirmed airdrops
What I did this week
Here are the main activities that I did to potentially qualify for these airdrops:
Waitlist Opportunities
🗳Proposals
Galxe/Superboard/Layer3 Campaigns
Spectra - Superboard
High-Priority Campaigns
Low-Priority Campaigns
The first 150 to complete it will receive 10 OP
Free for those who verified with Self; otherwise, it starts at $5
The 30-day challenge to go from zero to Signal Creator
Want to capture the next wave of airdrops? You need both onchain and social reputation.
Stop wasting hours on low-value tasks and start building habits and systems that projects will reward with bigger airdrops.
Build the foundations for a reputable brand in just 30 days with one actionable tip you can implement each day.
It’s time to stop burning out on low-value tasks:
🖼 NFT Opportunities
🌍 Others
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[How perp DEX farming tricks you into losing money]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/how-perp-dex-farming-tricks-you-into-losing-money ul2BckR1NM5RoK6wa8CYFri, 14 Nov 2025 16:32:20 GMTI’ve stopped farming perp DEXes, and maybe you should too.
Every airdrop post will have at least one mention of a perp DEX, and it gets tiring.
While it has overtaken the entire meta, I still don’t have the motivation to continue trading on them.
If you’re a bad trader (like me), it’s time to skip it and look for another opportunity:
There’s so much that we don’t understand
Perps is a completely different ball game than just holding spot tokens.
It’s not just adding leverage to trading, there are many new mechanisms that we need to understand, including:
Funding rates
Auto-deleveraging (ADL)
Maintenance margin
Everything seems fine during normal market conditions without extreme volatility.
But the Oct 11 crash showed me how things start to break in these extreme scenarios:
- SLs didn’t trigger because there wasn’t liquidity
Agreed. Even putting SL in these crashes will do you no good. Hardly triggers.
\ 1](https://twitter.com/blaziken007/status/1977026007002693856) 22:58 • 11 Oct 2025
- Positions getting liquidated, even at 2x leverage
Even the most conservative traders I know got their trading accounts wiped out.
I know someone who had 2x on fartcoin that he bought in April dump at like 0.3ish rode it to 2 … then rebought Eveyrhiht at 0.5 … got fully liquidated
Another mega conservative guy had Pengu at
\ 836](https://twitter.com/wizardofsoho/status/1976966865860612487) 19:03 • 11 Oct 2025
- Cross margin wiped out the portfolios of many traders
A Post-Crash Pilot Debrief from The White Whale
$62M - gone in a flash. But as was repeatedly pounded into my head in pilot training: any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.
As I’ve been processing yesterday’s events, I want to share a few thoughts from a place
\ 5,936](https://twitter.com/TheWhiteWhaleV2/status/1977055646760546551) 0:56 • 12 Oct 2025
All the protection measures kicked in, which triggered a liquidation cascade (even without a major dump).
I’m grateful that I didn’t have any positions open during this period, as it would have caused considerable stress.
Even experienced traders were liquidated during the crash, which shows how unpredictable it can be.
I'm one of the 1,000 wallets.
Perps comes with its risks. I've been trading perps for more than 3 years now, but I still got liquidated.
Don't put all your funds into perp acct.
You can't win if you don't bet, but you can't bet if you lose everything.
More than 1,000 wallets on #Hyperliquid were completely wiped out in the market crash — losing everything.
In total, 6,300+ wallets are in the red, with combined losses exceeding $1.23B.
205 wallets lost over $1M
1,070+ wallets lost over $100K
Data based on Hyperliquid
\ 213](https://twitter.com/edison0xyz/status/1977041593032163817) 0:00 • 12 Oct 2025
And the reason why we’re taking more risks than we’re comfortable with is because of this:
Trading with leverage is normalised
I remember how many risk assessments I had to go through before I could trade options on a stock exchange.
It was so tedious, and I didn’t feel like trading it even when I was approved.
But crypto has made leverage so accessible, as long as you have a wallet:
Immediate access to trading up to 40x leverage, which preys on our gambling tendencies.
We have access to larger capital than we actually have, which sounds great in theory because we can make good returns, even when starting out from almost nothing.
But at the same time, leverage amplifies our losses, and we can lose our entire portfolio on a perp DEX.
Even experienced traders don't use much leverage.
People have been fed stories that someone got rich with 1 trade and hence many do trade on max leverage without understanding that even 20% dip can be so dangerous
\ 2](https://twitter.com/pizzacrypt/status/1977414800776056973) 0:43 • 13 Oct 2025
Leveraged trading has become so mainstream that we look ‘stupid’ for not using it.
Especially when everyone else is making good returns.
the proliferation of perp dexes had normalized leverage to such a degree that many beginners take it to be harmless
and that they’re “him” aka trading gods
met so many at token and all they wanted to talk about was farming perp dexes
last night crash proves that the majority
\ 144](https://twitter.com/maverick23NFT/status/1977021542665273802) 22:40 • 11 Oct 2025
We’ve been conditioned to think that it’s so easy to get a 10x or 100x trade in crypto.
Especially when everyone flexes their PnLs to trigger dopamine responses in the rest of us.
But we don’t even know if they are real since anything can be photoshopped.
Crypto decentralised access to the casino which preys on our gambling tendencies.
And most of us either wins big or loses badly when trading perps:
Farming perp DEXes is a zero-sum game
So many posts on the timeline make you feel bad for not farming perp DEXes.
KOLs flex their points and volume traded, and this induces FOMO in the rest of us.
Even when you’re not sure of how to trade (like me), you think it’s the ‘only’ way to get airdrops.
Some may even take more risks than they’re comfortable with to get the airdrop, but the allocation they receive may not cover all the fees they burn.
As more and more participants start to farm a perp DEX, it becomes -EV to farm them for points.
These are PvP systems with a limited number of points being distributed each week.
It gets harder to earn them because point distributions are done retroactively based on the overall activity.
So burning fees in the hope of getting more points is not worth it, unless you’re able to make a profit from your trading activity.
This might be hot take but I don't think there will be crazy upside in Perp airdrop if you are thinking to solely farm them.
- Alpha level upside comes from "inefficiency of market". When everyone knows that there is "profit" and go after it, market is efficient and there is no
\ 15](https://twitter.com/ditto_/status/1987798436411044212) 16:24 • 10 Nov 2025
This could be a reason why Hyperliquid did so well because some (like silly me) were busy spamming volume on LogX and Orderly while barely doing much there.
I’ve stopped farming perp DEXes becahse I’m a bad trader and will lose money by trading frequently.
I probably could spend more time trying to learn how effective trading, but it takes up way too much time:
Time needs to be factored in
Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but trading perps takes up too much of my time.
Even while delta-neutral strategies seem like a risk-free and easy way to farm perp DEXes, there are a lot of nuances required to do it right:
Getting the same entry and exit prices on both platforms
Monitoring the funding rates to make it worth holding the position open
Managing liquidations and margin used
Transferring funds between exchanges to have enough collateral
The perp DEX airdrop playbook seems simple:
- Open short on one DEX and...
- ... a long on another for perp DEXs
Key is to monitor funding spread to generate outrageous APYs (e.g., 1256% APR on $ZORA)
Use funding rate arbitrage scanners like @LorisTools, @Arbitraxdexs or the
\ 325](https://twitter.com/DefiIgnas/status/1988970798951145767) 22:02 • 13 Nov 2025
I’ve tried opening a few positions and realised that it’s just not for me.
A lot of these technicalities are not shared by KOLs when they want to shill delta-neutral strategies.
Time is the worst asset to burn, because it cannot be earned back.
And I see perp DEXes as a huge time sink because there are too many factors to consider and monitor.
Maybe I’ll be the biggest fool when the TGE is out, but I don’t see a point in trading on multiple perp DEXes at the same time (apart from the airdrops):
There are too many perp DEXes
I’m likely not the target audience for a perp DEX, but I don’t see a reason why we need so many of them.
I can’t find anything unique for most of them, and they all look almost the same, with a chart and the trade options.
In the past cycle, GMX and dYdX were major players, but both have faded in prominence with the rise of new platforms.
With the ‘success’ of Aster (and Lighter), everyone started launching their own perp DEX (including Justin Sun).
I remember when the WUKONG memecoin on Tron went crazy and everyone started throwing money into Tron for the first few weeks.
One year later, SunPump is barely earning any fees.
Now everyone wants to build their perp DEX, and I'm not going to touch SunPerp because I don't have
Today sunperp.com is rotating its chief customer support role, and I’ll be taking it on for a day. Sunperp has just entered public beta, so feel free to use it as you like. If you run into any issues, just throw them my way. @SunPerp_DEX
\ 24](https://twitter.com/fipcrypto/status/1969082695495139746) 0:54 • 20 Sept 2025
But I have zero motivation to explore the new ones, if they’re going to look and feel almost the same.
I'm in a very tough position here
to farm these perps dexes, I've had to go long on dex no.1, short on dex no.2, long on dex no.3, short on dex no.4, and long on dex no.5 to hedge
however, I can not find a sixth perps dex
can someone help me? my family is starving
\ 1,009](https://twitter.com/0xMert_/status/1969876674708754676) 5:29 • 22 Sept 2025
Everyone else and their family wallets are all doing the same actions, so it’s a waste of time trying to outcompete them.
Especially if I’m burning fees in hopes of the token.
I will skip grinding out in this meta, because I want to focus on other things:
Trading isn’t the only way to get rich
I’m a horrible trader and it will stay that way.
FOMO made me trade on the wrong perp DEXes (Orderly and LogX), and I got burnt out because I kept incurring losses.
I don’t see a point in farming volume on perp DEXes anymore because it’s a race to the bottom.
Just like other campaigns on MM and Rainbow:
It becomes a competition of who is willing to burn the most fees.
Projects are begging you to farm them when they launch point programs with known criteria.
They give you the playbook to get points, and it becomes a PvP game of who can burn the most fees.
Only MM and OpenSea win, while their users will likely get low returns if it's too
This situation with @opensea and @MetaMask is so weird to me.
We get that you want to attract as many users to use the app, so you have built a points and chest system for people interact and win some prizes.
This is great, but the problem you all are doing, is how you have
\ 39](https://twitter.com/fipcrypto/status/1984605601247477828) 20:57 • 1 Nov 2025
And it doesn’t make sense for me to continuously lose money in the hopes of getting a good future airdrop.
But it doesn’t mean that I plan to skip perp DEXes entirely.
I’ll just do whatever I can, like making small trades whenever there are big market movements.
Trading is just one way to get rich in crypto, and we don’t need to be a good trader to be successful here.
There are many routes, including just exploring anything new and sharing our experiences.
Farming perp DEXes burns me out, so I’m doing this instead to build wealth:
\ 48](https://twitter.com/fipcrypto/status/1975190613361397934) 21:25 • 6 Oct 2025
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[How I’m unlocking more airdrop allocations with this mindset shift]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/how-im-unlocking-more-airdrop-allocations-with-this-mindset-shift cHV9h8pEe9sICEioLWOnTue, 11 Nov 2025 16:08:19 GMTIf you want more luck in airdrops, you have to take more shots.
There’s no guarantee of airdrops anymore, and solely relying on onchain actions is killing our chances of good airdrops.
To increase our chances of high allocations, we have to increase our luck surface area and cover all bases.
Here’s the exact strategy that I’m using:
Luck can be engineered
We get lucky in relationships by “putting ourselves out there”.
This is the famous advice for finding a significant other.
No matter how good-looking or how awesome a person you are:
No one knows that you exist unless you’re actively meeting people.
The same thing applies to airdrops, where we get nothing if we sit around and wait for airdrops to come to us.
And here’s how we do it:
Cover all bases where possible
Airdrops no longer reward users just for their onchain activity.
Likely because onchain metrics can be easily gamed by spinning up multiple wallets.
Now, other contributions are being awarded too (sometimes even more than onchain).
The social aspect is growing in prominence all thanks to InfoFi, and it’s the new meta we’re in.
We don’t know for sure what contributions the project would find valuable:
So we cover all bases to increase our luck surface area.
Instead of relying on just social or onchain:
We do both to increase our exposure for the airdrop.
And that’s the whole formula for luck surface area too:
Luck = Saying X Doing
You have the authority because you’ve actually done the work.
You have the reach because people trust you.
And you’ve built up a network of ‘smart followers’ that could give you a life-changing opportunity.
Many don’t want to start because they feel cringe when shilling projects.
But there’s nothing to be ashamed of if you’re doing this:
Say what you did onchain
Too many are talking about projects on the leaderboard without even interacting with them.
Others can tell that you’re just a dopamine yapper and would eventually mute you.
So here’s the easiest way to talk about a project:
Say how you interacted with them onchain.
No one can doubt that you did it because there’s proof that you did.
Some would complain that they hate yapping for airdrops.
But there’s no need to yap mindlessly.
Instead, treat it like a journal to your former self.
Write to him/her and tell them how to achieve what you did in a shorter amount of time.
I started out as a complete nobody, but eventually built up my presence to where it is now.
And you become more skilled when this happens:
You learn more by doing
You could sit around and read tons of airdrop guides.
But you will learn so much more by trying things out yourself and documenting your lessons.
Some projects may have a minimum amount, but you could just start small with most, build capital, and share your experiences with most projects.
Somewhere out there, someone is looking for the information you provide to get started on their journey.
And you’ll eventually build trust with them because you helped them out along the way.
Get weekly strategies on becoming a Signal Creator that attracts rewards with a strong onchain and social footprint.
Take the shot, even if it means failure
I’m not saying that I’m the best, because I’ve had many failures too.
But sharing these failures makes you more human too:
You don’t seem like this all-knowing perfect person who wins every single time.
Those who portray that image are just trying to make themselves look good and lose that connection.
It’s perfectly fine to make mistakes.
Yes, someone will mock you for it.
But, so what?
They’re a complete stranger who likely hasn’t done anything in their life, so why are we listening to them?
We focus too much on the negativity (I’m guilty of this too) when there are others who value your insights.
So instead of being ‘just another account’:
Look to be authentically yourself while doing tasks onchain and sharing what you did.
The cost of inaction is too high
There’s no point sitting on the fence for airdrops:
Either you take action, or skip it completely.
Onchain alone is not good enough, so we need to supplement it by sharing what we did on Twitter.
Airdrops will go to high-value individuals with a strong onchain and social reputation.
So to increase your luck surface area:
Take deliberate actions to expand it by saying what you did onchain.
If you are tired of mindless grinding for airdrops, build a reputation that compounds (instead of burning out), and earn rewards just by being yourself:
Join the 30-Day Signal Creator Challenge here.
]]>stacksignal@newsletter.paragraph.com (Gideon Ng)<![CDATA[What everyone gets wrong about airdrop farmers]]>https://paragraph.com/@stacksignal/what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-airdrop-farmers RR3NAOjoAXTPVAumLJfWMon, 10 Nov 2025 14:32:35 GMTAirdrops always end in chaos.
We’ve all been conditioned to expect free money for doing low-value effort.
Projects know and feed into that greed, but it leads to a toxic situation whenever a checker is released:
‘Loyal’ community members sending death threats to the team because they didn’t get the allocation they expected.
This was the real situation that @icobeast referenced when he said that airdrop farmers are the “single worst possible foundation for a community”.
Airdrop farmers are the single worst possible foundation for a community (except for maybe 'gaming' airdrop farmers)
They're all mercenary gaslighters who will literally turn the barrel around on you the *instant* you suggest that they'll get less than they think they deserve
Megaeth 24h post allo
1 negative review
Monad 24h post allo
64 negative reviews
are airdrops the right mechanism for long term sentiment and success?
\ 1,041](https://twitter.com/icobeast/status/1986985307145671142) 10:33 • 8 Nov 2025
And not that airdrop farmers are bad.
So let’s end the airdrop farming debate once and for all:
Farming is part of human nature
Everything can be exploited, will be exploited.
This was the key takeaway I had from @alachacolate’s piece on Sybil farming.
Quoting from the article:
we were somewhat cognizant of the potential backlash of requiring face scans, but we vastly underestimated the lengths people would take to farm this reward
what we saw was that individuals were setting up wallets for themselves, their parents, siblings, children, friends, neighbors, and anyone else they knew so they could get unique face scans and collect the $25 deposit. we ended up shutting down the promotion within 12 hours because of the sheer magnitude of people that were manipulating the system to farm the reward
\ 206](https://twitter.com/akachacolate/status/1890209027050864906) 9:18 • 14 Feb 2025
This goes beyond crypto and is apparent in my country too:
Whenever there’s a promotion that gives money or credits freely, we will look to exploit it for maximal gains.
We had this entire ‘saga’ from a fintech company where the incentives were exploited until it became unsustainable to continue running the campaign.
“Never underestimate the lengths people will go to for free money”.
If the time and effort cost is low, the campaign will be exploited.
It is human nature for us to extract anything we see as a quick win.
Some projects know full well about this, but they still choose to lean into this behaviour:
Projects brought this upon themselves
The mainstream crypto marketing playbook is boring.
Some projects know that no one would use their product, so they lean into hype marketing to attract users.
They think that the only way to attract users is with a token, and their campaign is basically:
Hinting at a token
Claiming that they’re ‘for the community’
Rewarding low-value tasks like spamming Discord or completing testnet tasks
Some projects used vague terms to hype up their token so users (and their family of wallets) would flock over.
While others would beg us to farm them by actively shilling their token.
This made us conditioned to think that we will receive airdrops just by completing simple tasks (me included).
It's true, the entitled group of airdrop farmers who think they deserve six figs for saying "gm" in discord are not your community.
But the teams are usually just as much to blame.
If you run campaigns that attract these sybil groups (galxe quests, incentivized testnets,
Airdrop farmers are the single worst possible foundation for a community (except for maybe 'gaming' airdrop farmers)
\ 136](https://twitter.com/0xNarb/status/1987185642611122590) 23:49 • 8 Nov 2025
I was successful in 2024 by finding these campaigns to complete and earning decent airdrops.
Projects choose this easy way to inflate their metrics and get funding from VCs.
Seeing a lot of founders comment under this post that "airdrop farmers are scum"
Yeah bro. SURE! AIRDROP FARMERS are the reason that your token price and TVL is zero.
Retards. Airdrop farmers are the only reason you were able to raise at the valuations that you did.
Points
Airdrop farmers are the single worst possible foundation for a community (except for maybe 'gaming' airdrop farmers)
\ 298](https://twitter.com/jrugss/status/1987488766236537287) 19:53 • 9 Nov 2025
Their marketing campaigns all involve hinting at throwing free money at users, so they’re incentivised to use the product even if they hate it.
But then, these projects turn back on the users who inflated their metrics and labelled them as ineligible.
i largely agree with your take...but i also feel somewhere along the way, extractive projects start taking advantage of these airdrop farmers which led us to current situation
the irony is that projects needed farmers at one point: to bootstrap liquidity, look attractive to
\ 0](https://twitter.com/AvengerAli/status/1987083071527821733) 17:01 • 8 Nov 2025
It doesn’t help that these projects gave derogatory names that fuelled the flame:
E-beggars (Starknet)
Onchain prostitutes (Hyperlane)
I understand where they come from, but they were basically digging their graves by triggering farmers more.
People aren’t the problem.
Projects that intentionally lean on airdrop hype and ‘participation metrics’ and then turn around and mock the same users… that’s the problem.
\ 17](https://twitter.com/ethjup2/status/1987183185072103751) 23:39 • 8 Nov 2025
This space made us expect rewards for low-value tasks, but that is no longer possible.
The competition is getting harder because of Sybils that aim to exploit these ‘free money mechanics’.
Projects can choose to do either of these options:
Completely eliminate all low-value tasks from their eligibility criteria
Reward both Sybils and humans, which dilutes the entire pool
Projects are guilty of farming us to inflate their metrics, and there’s no denying that fact.
But that’s because of misaligned incentives, where they reward actions that give them short-term hype instead of long-term retention.
It's actually very simple. Just build your project, never promise a reward. Be clear. Let people who are curious about your project come and engage with it without any expectations (without the project owners giving them any). But for a long time, many projects have been using
\ 0](https://twitter.com/0xnull/status/1987310352007053681) 8:04 • 9 Nov 2025
This is the same reason why InfoFi campaigns become so spammy:
Projects choose to reward vanity metrics on posts instead of those that are truly valuable (because it’s harder to identify these).
They reward those who are here solely for the rewards because it inflates their metrics, while those who genuinely contributed to the project get less, and they feel disheartened.
And these are the projects that are forgotten because they couldn’t identify the individuals who were most aligned with them.
If the product was that good, there would be a strong user base, regardless if there are incentives or not.
Some projects (not all) know that they add nothing of value to the world and rely on these incentives to stay relevant.
But they’re not the only ones at fault because another party has a part to play:
KOLs fuel the fire
Let’s go back to the Scroll airdrop.
Just after Starknet announced its allocation to GitHub contributions,
KOLs started telling their followers to make contributions to Scroll’s GitHub.
recently some airdrop hunting accounts shared the scroll github repos with a “farming guide”.
please don’t submit a GitHub issue just for farming purposes.
overnight, we have received 600+ low quality submissions that we have to divert resources to parse through.
the scroll
\ 520](https://twitter.com/pseudotheos/status/1759188530037674019) 20:10 • 18 Feb 2024
While they didn’t explicitly tell them to farm, many just started spamming commits like correcting grammar or trivial edits.
Thanks @CelestiaOrg and @Starknet for ruining OSS in crypto
And no, if you spam our Github repos with typo fixes, you're only wasting your and our time
\ 516](https://twitter.com/toghrulmaharram/status/1759208872466612510) 21:30 • 18 Feb 2024
KOLs know that they get the most engagement for shilling a $0 airdrop task.
There’s a wider pool of audience that is interested in free airdrops
Who wouldn’t want to earn money with just a few clicks of a button and no capital cost?
The standard “POTENTIAL = $10,000 COST = $0” threads fuel unrealistic expectations for a project’s airdrop.
When there’s absolutely no guarantee, but these accounts will lean into the hype for views.
Due to legal reasons, some projects can’t call out these threads and manage expectations, which makes matters worse.
Great analysis and perspective on the $ZK airdrop.
If I could add a few things on the design:
1. Industrial Sybil Farming
2. Regulatory Regime
3. Unrealistic Expectations
4. What we could have done differently
-- -- --
Industrial Sybil Farming
Last year, all major TGE
\ 179](https://twitter.com/frogmonkee/status/1957261285026087079) 10:00 • 18 Aug 2025
KOLs are experts at triggering emotions, especially after the checker is out.
They know that many are unhappy with their allocations, and lean into emotions to get even more engagement.
First, they shill a project and hype it up to get maximum engagement.
Then, when a project doesn’t meet their expectations, they ‘speak up for the community’ to get even more engagement.
KOLs fuel the flames and tell their followers that they are right and deserve rewards for their interactions.
And for all we know, a KOL can literally photoshop a screenshot of their allocation, and we’ll never know.
Which is why onchain footprint is still the most important factor for trust, because it cannot be faked.
So we get the 2 key pillars that lead to this state:
Overhyping (projects + KOLs) and underdelivering (projects).
Both are at fault for the default mindset that many farmers have:
Airdrop farmers are entitled
@icobeast received a lot of hate for calling out airdrop farmers when he’s an ‘airdrop farmer’ himself with Blast, Virtuals, and even Kaito.
There is no denying that we are all here to make money. But there are toxic and non-toxic ways to make money here.
Which is why there’s a key difference between an airdrop farmer and an airdrop hunter:
An airdrop farmer has an entitled mindset.
To all the airdrop farmers out there,
The allocation you imagined is not the allocation you get.
So stop fudding projects just because you thought they'll give you 5 figs.
Appreciate how easy it still is to make money in Web3.
There are people grinding 12 hours a day for $50.
Airdrop farmers are the single worst possible foundation for a community (except for maybe 'gaming' airdrop farmers)
\ 184](https://twitter.com/manyaaww/status/1987150637667393802) 21:30 • 8 Nov 2025
I mentioned the key characteristics of an airdrop farmer here .
Farmers are entitled because they:
Expect an airdrop for their interactions (which are sometimes the bare minimum)
Complain loudly on social media if they don’t qualify or get a low amount
The worst part about airdrop farmers is the entitlement.
also Problematic that teams have to spend time on TGE planning around mitigating the amount of harm farmers dumping your token will cause to the actual community
\ 28](https://twitter.com/beausecurity/status/1987148452070039872) 21:21 • 8 Nov 2025
CT has conditioned us to think that we deserve rewards.
We set an expectation on how much we’ll receive from an airdrop, because KOLs and projects hype up the campaign.
And when the reality doesn’t meet these expectations, the space becomes toxic.
Yep i’ve stood by this perspective for a long time
happiness = reality - expectations
if you set expectations high and reality is low you get this
\ 14](https://twitter.com/serpinxbt/status/1987203700838867395) 1:00 • 9 Nov 2025
The entire ‘community’ turns on you.
Quoting from @advaith’s experience with farmers after the Succinct airdrop, this was what the team experienced:
Flooding Twitter and Discord with absurd and offensive things
Wishing that his mother would die of cancer
Attacking anyone affiliated with the team, or even those who received higher allocations than them
Dropping hate comments, even months after the airdrop
I’m a dev at Succinct and it’s fair to say we had a “controversial” airdrop.
I’m not here to talk numbers, but to mention that I was quite close to the community since the inception of our testnet (and therefore rewards program). I joined the Discord for the primary intention of
\ 138](https://twitter.com/advaith/status/1987232742489444371) 2:56 • 9 Nov 2025
Till this day, there are accounts that are still bitter with the ZKsync airdrop one year later.
This is the kind of behaviour that should not be condoned.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money from airdrops, because that’s everyone’s goal.
But how we react to not getting the allocation we expect is the key defining characteristic of an airdrop farmer:
Those who pretend to be ‘aligned’ with the project and bootlick the team in hopes of getting a higher allocation, but then turn on them immediately once things don’t go their way:
I appreciate it. The timeline got extremely dunk happy today.
I wish they’d bring the same energy for scammers and bad actors. This whole place would be better for it.
I do think the entire airdrop farming thing is big disconnect. I keep seeing people dunking on me for
\ 14](https://twitter.com/icobeast/status/1987678130170139121) 8:26 • 10 Nov 2025
Emotions are the mind-killer for airdrops
Airdrops and emotions are never a good mix.
It’s fine to be disappointed with airdrops, but hurling toxic comments at the team and sending death threats is uncalled for.
Especially when they don’t owe you anything.
I’ve received a lot of hate, but I still stand by this:
Projects have zero obligation to give you tokens, just because you interacted with them.
Just like everything in life, airdrops are never guaranteed.
Points mean nothing except a ‘promise’.
Nothing is final until the official announcement. And even then, the terms can change before TGE happens.
Of course, you’ll call me a hypocrite and that I’m gaslighting others by saying that you don’t deserve an airdrop.
But that is completely up to the project to decide how they want to allocate it, which is beyond our control.
Again, not saying that projects are completely not at fault because some continue to reward low-value tasks.
But it’s easy to be toxic online when things don’t go our way because there are no repercussions for saying anything.
Being overly emotional clouds judgment, and that’s why I’m doing my best to detach from the outcome.
I am not perfect at this either and will get frustrated at some allocations, but again, there is no need to mock or be toxic towards a project.
Yes, I am guilty of these actions before, but I’ve realised that there’s no point except for boosting my ego and farming engagement.
And the sooner you realise this, the better:
Time and effort no longer matter
Many see airdrops as a job, where the more hours you put in, the more rewards you get.
That is true for some airdrops, but it’s not always the case:
The amount of time you put in is not proportional to the rewards you earn, especially if you’re doing low-value tasks.
Which is why some can barely interact with a project and still get the highest allocations.
Airdrops are a value transfer where you have to give value first to get the airdrop back.
Of course, everyone would claim that their contributions are valuable.
This is the typical post I see whenever a checker comes out:
‘I did X, Y, and Z, but I received nothing.’
A project that truly cares about their community would want to reward those who are aligned with them.
But there will always be those who fall through the cracks, and our aim is to not be that account that barely makes the cut.
So if your strategy involves spamming plenty of low-value tasks, then it needs a serious rethink.
totally agree, i repeated this many times but will do final one:
wtf people think they gonna get rewarded for using testnet when there is 100m of unique wallets while each tx is free so project only waste money …
i understand when projects like sahara do limited forms for
\ 0](https://twitter.com/bolsaverse/status/1987296432152523218) 7:09 • 9 Nov 2025
The question you need to ask yourself:
How am I providing real value to the project with my contributions?
Yeah I really do think the entitlement problem is quite widespread in crypto and people need to be more honest with themselves about the value they truly provide to others
Glad you enjoyed the file system tho, that took a looooong time to do
\ 1](https://twitter.com/advaith/status/1987721508559741366) 11:18 • 10 Nov 2025
If my actions can be replicated by millions of Sybils, then is it really valuable?
That’s the reason why no other L2 can follow the Arbitrum playbook for their airdrop:
The barrier to entry for hitting maximum points for the highest allocation is low, so Sybils can do the exact same actions at scale.
Arbtitrum was able to use easier criteria for their airdrop because that was before multiple Sybil farms sprung up.
And that’s the reason why skin in the game is becoming an increasingly valued metric to reward airdrops:
Humans are risk on, Sybils are risk off.
The more risk you incur, the greater allocation you’ll receive (though it’s not always guaranteed).
REAL airdrops are simpler than you think
the more you have to risk
the better the airdrop
yapping, using a testnet, quests have 0 risk. ZERO.
that’s why they are compelling to the masses and reward little / nothing
\ 547](https://twitter.com/serpinxbt/status/1987278130172641478) 5:56 • 9 Nov 2025
Yes, airdrops have gotten harder because of Sybils.
But you can choose to either complain that the game is rigged, or see how you can add meaningful contributions to a project and get a higher allocation.
And that determines your success for airdrops (and life in general):
You have the power to choose what you interact with
Just because everyone else is doing an airdrop, doesn’t mean you should.
I’m barely touching perp DEXes even though it’s the meta now, because it’s a huge time sink for me.
If it doesn’t make sense with your time and capital constraints, skip it.
If you can’t find a reason to use the project except for the airdrop, skip it.
If everyone is mindlessly hyping up a project, skip it.
If the project is begging you to farm them, skip it.
You choose what you interact with, not because some KOL told you to.
The moment you can blame yourself for the failures that you make, the more control you have.
@SahilBloom wrote an article on the Victim Mentality, which is extremely applicable to airdrops:
When we attribute our own misses, failures, and challenges to factors outside our control, we give up our power. Alternatively, when we embrace accountability—when we take ownership of our situation and the actions and beliefs that are within our control—we take back that power. Life definitely isn't fair. It's a troubling reality.
But instead of wasting energy on every obstacle in your way, focus on what you can control and how you can break through.
We have zero control over the outcome of our airdrop allocation.
But we have full control over how we allocate our time and money.
Complaining does nothing because we’re wasting energy worrying about factors that we can’t control.
But if we blame only ourselves for our failures, we take back control over our lives.
We have the power to decide what we want to interact with.
We can choose to use projects that we care about.
The ones we genuinely enjoy using and can even make a profit with, instead of actively grinding projects that we hate to get tokens that we want to dump immdediately.
There are ways to get airdrops
I’m not telling you that farming airdrops is bad.
But I’m telling you that we need to adapt and evolve.
It’s impossible to do the same low-value actions that worked before and expect the same result today.
The problem is that “expectation” is a relative term.
If I bring my dad into crypto, a $150 airdrop for him would be a miracle because he had no prior baseline.
The problem you’re describing here is psychological.
If you got a $100k airdrop from a project by doing nothing,
\ 32](https://twitter.com/leonabboud_/status/1987166040435167430) 22:31 • 8 Nov 2025
But the competition has gotten stiffer thanks to Sybils, and you’ll either get a low allocation or be filtered out completely.
And there’s no room for toxicity either, just because you didn’t get what you expected.
That was the main point that @icobeast was trying to drill down on with his post, and one that I fully agree with.
The amount of hate that he received just shows how toxic this space is.
its inevitable any person that runs into influence fast will be disliked, esp with hot take tweets
@icobeast is a good guy, you don't have to like every single one of his posts, but taking it beyond that to hate him because of this when he isn't a rugger or scammer is overblown
\ 98](https://twitter.com/Loopifyyy/status/1987816190866305350) 17:34 • 10 Nov 2025
It is fine to be disappointed, but it is not ok to be toxic when things don’t go your way.
I will receive a lot of hate for this post, but so be it.
You can say all you want about me having the ‘moral high ground’ and that I’m a hypocrite because I’m farming airdrops.
But once again, the entitled mindset is what makes the difference between an airdrop farmer and an airdrop hunter.
We are all here to make money, but there is no need to be emotional over outcomes that we can’t control.
We cannot control how projects overhype their projects, but we can control how we manage our expectations.
So it is not only up to users to lower their expectations or be satisfied with what they get, but also up to the projects not to raise expectations too high
\ 169](https://twitter.com/waleswoosh/status/1987108179340300342) 18:41 • 8 Nov 2025
Yes, projects and KOLs (even me) are at fault, there is no denying that.
But ignore anything that is beyond your control, and channel the emotions and energy into the factors that you can control.
Now more than ever, judgment is the key skill for airdrops, and I shared more here:
\ 19](https://twitter.com/fipcrypto/status/1977742200651096135) 22:24 • 13 Oct 2025
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