A New Airdrop Farming Strategy: Yap-To-Earn

A New Airdrop Farming Strategy: Yap-To-Earn

Helping others understand the workings of a new protocol and contributing to discussions is becoming a way for projects to reward their community—also known as “yapping.”

Key Takeaways

• Yap-To-Earn is the idea of crypto projects rewarding users with airdrops based on their social media contributions, rather than traditional criteria like points or transaction history.

• The argument for Yap-To-Earn is that it fosters a positive and more engaged community instead of encouraging mercenary capital and pointless transactions seen in traditional airdrop farming.

• Yap-To-Earn is a growing trend pioneered by Solana dApp Sanctum, but it remains to be seen if it will be adopted as a main airdrop criteria by other crypto projects.

Hello, fellow airdrop farmers! I know the struggle all too well as we continue to receive airdrop after airdrop, often worth little more than dust. After investing so much time and money, it can be disheartening to end up with only a handful of tokens. It’s clear that the airdrop farming landscape is becoming increasingly saturated, making traditional methods like liquidity providing (LPing), staking, and spamming transactions feel unrewarded.

There is however, a new method of airdrop distribution on the rise that could be worth your attention, the new meta of airdrop farming, Yap-To-Earn.

What Is Yap-To-Earn?

As airdrop farming becomes more mainstream, it becomes harder for projects to distinguish between sybil airdrop farmers and genuine users. This process of filtering out sybil farmers can be difficult and costly, often leading to stricter criteria that inadvertently exclude legitimate participants.

However, several projects have started to shift their focus from on-chain activity to off-chain contributions via social media platforms like Discord and X (formerly Twitter). While it's not a completely new concept—many projects have traditionally granted Discord roles to active community members, occasionally rewarding them with extra tokens—these roles were generally seen as supplementary, with primary rewards still tied to on-chain activity.

Now, there's a growing emphasis on identifying real users and supporters through social media interactions, rather than relying solely on mercenary airdrop farmers who invest just to withdraw tokens after an airdrop. Despite its promise, this method of airdrop distribution remains controversial. Notably, Sanctum has taken the lead in pioneering the idea of using social media contribution as a main airdrop criteria.

The Yap-To-Earn Pioneer: Sanctum

On 18 July 2024, Sanctum, a Solana Liquid Staking protocol, allocated half of their airdrop to social media contributions through a new metric they called “Earnestness”. 

Source: Sanctum official blog

Through capital allocation, which is what users know normally as liquidity provision, over 100 thousand wallets were eligible for the airdrop. Comparatively, to judge Earnestness, the Sanctum team manually went through millions of posts across Telegram, Discord, Twitter and Youtube. In the end, only about 2000 users were eligible for this Earnest allocation. This means, an Earnest user on average received about 50 times more tokens than a regular airdrop farmer.

Source: Sanctum official blog

This move was highly controversial, as users pushed back on how it was unfair that their monetary contributions were valued much less than these “Yappers”. Nevertheless, it remains a fact that the yappers were more lucratively rewarded than traditional airdrop farmers in this case.

What Kind of Social Media Contributions Were Rewarded?

To clarify community concerns, FP Lee from team Sanctum shared insights on measuring Earnestness in a post on X. He explained that the goal was to “reward the behavior we want to see more of”, which was learning, teaching and helping others, not airdrop farming. Active users who answered questions, assisted others, and reported spam on social media were recognized, while “yes-men” and bull posters were excluded.

FP Lee concluded with a statement reflecting the team's philosophy on this airdrop allocation: “No airdrop is going to make everybody happy. But that's OK – we are trying our hardest to make good people happy instead”.

== On the $CLOUD airdrop, part 1 ==

There is a rot in crypto: the scams, the ponzis, the memecoin rugs. The bigger we grow, the more grifters show up -- like centipedes slithering out of the floorboards -- and the more polluted this space gets.

But strip away the rotten… pic.twitter.com/bVLkDMkfAD

— FP Lee (@soleconomist) July 2, 2024

EigenLayer Follows Suit

On 5 September 2024, as the EIGEN token unlock approached, EigenLayer announced a new category of users which will be included in EIGEN’s season 2 stakedrop, the community. 

Source: @eigenfoundation on X

The EigenLayer team recognised contributions across various social media channels much like how Sanctum did.

6k $EIGEN airdrop just for sharing my thoughts on Eigenlayer.

That's $18k USD at the pre-market price.

What other industry rewards creators like this? Only possible in crypto (and OnlyFans).

Thanks @eigenfoundation pic.twitter.com/6ggOSYhmuR

— Ignas | DeFi (@DefiIgnas) September 17, 2024

While many users continued to express their frustration over the perceived unfairness of this allocation method, those who were selected often received substantial rewards.

The Future of Airdrop Farming

Token allocation details in Yap-To-Earn are more ambiguous than traditional airdrop farming. However, given the vast number of wallets currently involved in airdrop farming, Yap-To-Earn seems to be a less competitive market to stand out in.

While it may be unrealistic to expect everyday users to receive token allocations on par with crypto influencers, the evolving landscape of airdrops suggests that “Yapping” could be a more viable option for the average airdrop farmer.

How To Yap

There is no hard and fast rule on how one should yap, but taking into account the ethos of Yap-To-Earn and FP Lee’s comments here are some general guidelines.

Be Active and Help Others on Discord

While news and influencers dominate the X space, there is an abundance of users with general questions such as “How to do…” and “What is…”. Help these guys out, point them in the right direction, and help out wherever you can.

An example of a “Get Help” section in Jupiter’s Discord.

Share Thoughts and Insights on X

With Yap-To-Earn on the rise, you have even more reason to try your hand at being a crypto influencer. Don’t just bullpost, explain why some token is your favorite and explain what may go wrong too. If you’re lucky, you’ll become a crypto influencer, if not, maybe you’ll get an airdrop!

Be Nice

In a world of rugpulls and exploits, being a generally positive person in the community seems to be valued highly. If you’re not the writer type, posting memes, jokes, vibing in the community and driving conversations may just be enough to earn you enough yapping points for an airdrop!

Conclusion

While some projects have decided on Yap-To-Earn as one of their airdrop criteria, it is unclear if it will truly become a mainstream airdrop criteria. Regardless, as an airdrop farming method that generally requires no monetary investment, it can potentially be a lucrative airdrop farming strategy much like testnet airdrop farming.

Before investing in any cryptocurrency or project, always do your own research and never invest more than you can afford to lose.