Top 10 Upcoming Crypto Airdrops in 2026 (UPDATED)

Crypto Airdrops in 2026

Some airdrops to look out for in Q1 2026 include Polymarket and Backpack. Other projects such as Metamask and Base are also rumored to launch their tokens in 2026.

Key Takeaways

• A growing trend in token airdrops is the adoption of a point system which is used to stimulate user participation and liquidity.

• There has been a good number of airdrops every year since 2020. To increase your chances of qualifying for an airdrop, you can look into becoming an early user of projects that are likely to offer airdrops.

• Airdrops allows projects to bootstrap liquidity, while also distributing governance rights to users to participate in the future of the project.

This article was updated in March 2026.

Interested in receiving some free crypto in your wallet? As part of their token launch, some cryptocurrency projects send free tokens to their communities to drive adoption, an activity commonly known as “airdrops.” But what are airdrops, and how do you qualify for these free tokens? Read on!

What Are Crypto Airdrops?

Cryptocurrency projects are big on incentivization as a way to drive interest towards their brand and the product itself, and airdrops are designed to introduce users to the project and reward them in the process as a dual marketing and reward system. As you'll see in the list below, one of the most common ways to improve your eligibility for new airdrops is to use the testnet or interact with the protocol. 

Early airdrop programs were basically structured to introduce a new or existing project to the cryptocurrency community by rewarding new users who perform simple social tasks. On completion, the participants receive a certain number of token rewards. Currently, airdrop programs are adopting a point system, where the points users earn are converted to a share of the airdropped tokens. Users can usually earn these points by taking part in the project’s testnet, providing liquidity, and engaging in social tasks. 

Over the past years, airdrops have changed as the goal has shifted towards rewarding early adopters and significant contributors. After Uniswap’s high profile airdrop in 2020, where $6.43 billion worth of UNI was distributed (valued at its ATH token price of $42.88), every year has recorded significant airdrops:

• On 25th December 2021, OpenDAO airdropped a major portion of its SOS token to NFT traders on OpenSea. 

• Some of the most popular airdrops of 2022 were BAYC’s Apecoin airdrop to its NFT art holders, Ethereum Layer 2 network Optimism’s airdrop of its OP token, and Aptos’s airdrop to its early adopters.

• In 2023, we've already seen the Arbitrum airdrop, with over 42 million ARB claimed in the first hour. Other high profile airdrops in 2023 include Celestia's TIA and Blur.

• According to the CoinGecko 2024 annual report, there were 36 notable airdrops including Ethena, PENGU, Hyperliquid  and MagicEden which added over $20 billion to the overall crypto market cap in 2024.

With the year 2026 already upon us, let’s take a look at some likely airdrops that might be happening soon, and how you can qualify for these upcoming crypto airdrops.

Do note that unless specified otherwise, these potential airdrops are highly speculative and a feature in this list is no guarantee that an actual airdrop will happen in the future.

Backpack: The Regulated Exchange Built on the Solana Ecosystem

Backpack is a crypto ecosystem founded in 2022 by Armani Ferrante, a well-known Solana developer. It consists of three core products: the Backpack Wallet (a self-custodial, multi-chain wallet), Backpack Exchange (a regulated CEX holding a VARA license from Dubai, serving users in over 150 countries), and Mad Lads (a blue-chip NFT collection of 10,000 xNFTs on Solana). The company has raised $37 million from investors including Multicoin Capital, Placeholder VC, Jump Crypto, and Delphi Digital, and in January 2025 acquired FTX EU for $32.7 million, expanding its regulated footprint in Europe.

Why an Airdrop Is Likely

Backpack’s airdrop is considered highly likely after the team officially posted their TGE plan on February 9, 2026. In that plan, the team highlighted that 25% of the token would be distributed to the community, with 24% allocated to points holders and the remaining 1% to Mad Lads holders. Backpack is running a tiered Points program across multiple seasons, and the fourth season officially commenced on November 20, 2025.

Improving Airdrop Eligibility

The clearest path to a strong allocation is consistent, high-volume trading on Backpack Exchange. Points are calculated weekly on Fridays based on spot and perpetual futures trading volume, so frequent activity will always outperform one-off large trades. 

Strategies like repeatedly trading SOL/USDC pairs for spot, or using low-leverage futures (1–2x), are popular approaches for accumulating points efficiently. 

If you hold or can acquire a Mad Lads NFT, this grants automatic VIP 1 status on the Exchange (reducing trading fees) and a separate 1% token allocation on top of any Points earned. Referring active users also generates bonus points, though referred users must themselves trade for the referral to count. 

Note that Backpack actively monitors and bans accounts suspected of wash trading or running multiple accounts, so genuine usage is essential.

Polymarket: The World's Largest Prediction Market

Polymarket is a decentralized prediction market platform built on the Polygon blockchain, where users buy and sell shares on the outcomes of real-world events such as elections, economic indicators to sports and crypto markets. Launched in 2020, it has grown into the dominant platform in the prediction market space, with billions in cumulative trading volume. Polymarket gained widespread mainstream attention for its highly accurate forecasting of the 2024 U.S. presidential election results. The platform has raised over $70 million from investors including Founders Fund, Blockchain Capital, and Polychain Capital, and in October 2025 received a landmark $2 billion investment from the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE, the parent company of the NYSE), valuing Polymarket at approximately $9 billion.

Why an Airdrop Is Likely

The POLY token and an accompanying airdrop was first confirmed by Polymarket’s CMO Matthew Modabber during a podcast interview on October 24, 2025. The team however went silent on any timeline until February 4, 2026, when media outlets detected that Polymarket had just filed trademark applications for the ticker symbol $POLY. This filing follows after the firm’s formal return to the US markets. Now that Polymarket cleared previous regulatory hurdles (being previously banned in the US), their token launch is expected to follow shortly.

Improving Airdrop Eligibility

Since no official snapshot date has been announced, there may still be time to position yourself. The most important factor is consistent, genuine participation across a wide variety of prediction markets. Trading across multiple categories signals authentic usage rather than farming behaviour, as real users naturally spread their activity whereas bots tend to concentrate it. That being said, wallets that have been active since Polymarket's earlier years (2021–2023) are expected to carry a more meaningful advantage, thus lowering the farming value of current trades.

Polymarket has also encouraged users to link their X (Twitter) accounts to their profiles, which may factor into eligibility verification. Avoid creating multiple wallets, as Polymarket employs anti-Sybil detection, and wash-traded volume is likely to be excluded.

MetaMask: The OG Ethereum Crypto Wallet

Launched in 2016, MetaMask is an Ethereum-focused crypto wallet built by the Consensys team and is considered the pioneer in hot wallets. Before MetaMask, users would use browser extension wallets that required private keys management or other more technically demanding features. It can be said that the proliferation and eventual success of DeFi summer 2020 is enabled by innovative wallets such as MetaMask.

Why an Airdrop Is Likely

In September 2025, Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin confirmed with The Block that a MASK token is coming “sooner than you would expect”, with an official announcement later the same month. The post-2024 US elections with the Trump administration in the lead made token launches relatively easier from a regulatory point of view. Projects who had no tokenization plans prior began to announce TGE plans, possibly inspiring MetaMask to follow suit.

MetaMask will also be rolling out MetaMask Rewards, a seasonal points system with level-based rewards designed to reward on-chain trading activity, although exact details are yet to be announced.

Improving Airdrop Eligibility

There are millions of MetaMask users, to stand out and improve your airdrop eligibility, consider using MetaMask’s built-in features such as swapping, trading perps, and bridging tokens within the MetaMask wallet app. MetaMask has also recently launched their own stablecoin, mUSD in mid September 2025, usage of this stablecoin would likely also contribute to improving your airdrop eligibility.

With MetaMask being a tokenless flagship product for so long, it is likely that this airdrop, if it happens, will have extensive sybil safeguards in place. On-chain footprint, your wallet’s account history basically will probably play an important role in sybil detection and airdrop criterion if any.

Base: The Popular ETH L2 Launched by Coinbase

Base is a popular Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) incubated by the US crypto exchange Coinbase. Throughout 2024 and 2025, Base consistently ranks as the number 1 or 2 Ethereum L2 by Total Value Locked (TVL). While most other L2s of this size have launched their token, Base has not due to their ties to Coinbase and potential regulatory hurdles of a public company launching their own L2 token.

Why an Airdrop Is Likely

The main complication with Base launching a token is the fact that Coinbase is a public US company. This presents extreme regulatory hurdles with the SEC, which has largely left Base with no plans to launch a token. 

The crypto friendly Trump administration changed this and on September 15, 2025, coincidentally around the same time that MetaMask announced their tokenization plans as well, Base creator Jesse Pollak announced that the team is “exploring a Base network token”. While it is unclear if Base can actually clear their regulatory hurdles, the stance has clearly shifted and an airdrop is certainly now a real possibility.

Improving Airdrop Eligibility

Like many L2s before Base, users may improve their airdrop eligibility through organic usage of natively hosted DeFi protocols. Specifically, users can interact with dApps such as Aerodrome and Clanker, these dApps as of writing, function exclusively on the Base L2.

Although native dApps (Base exclusive) are preferred, activities on non-native dApps such as Aave and Uniswap will likely still contribute to improving your airdrop odds. Other miscellaneous actions such as minting a Base domain name can also be considered.

Aster: The Chief Rival to Hyperliquid

Effectively launched in late September 2025, Aster is a perpetuals (PERP) DEX backed by YZi Labs, the family office of Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the co-founder of Binance. Aster is positioned as Binance’s answer to the market domination of another Perp DEX, Hyperliquid.

Aster took the world by storm, with privacy features inspired by another viral trader, James Wynn, Aster quickly overtook Hyperliquid in terms of daily revenues and trading volume, in a matter of days. This was an exceptional achievement considering that Hyperliquid had a 72% market share in Q2 2025.

Why an Airdrop Is Likely

As of writing, Aster is currently running their “stage 6” airdrop campaign, where points will be distributed and used for an eventual 6th edition of their airdrop. In total, 53.5% of the ASTER token supply is currently earmarked for airdrops and will be presumably used for future airdrop “stages”.

Note: Leverage trading on perp DEXs is highly risky and can be costly. Users are not advised to airdrop farm using leverage unless you are a seasoned trader or have a detailed plan in mind.

Improving Airdrop Eligibility

While spot trading (without leverage) of crypto is available on the Aster platform, the bulk of the points allocation goes towards perpetuals trading. Besides trading perpetuals, users are also incentivized with more points to use asset pairs such as asBNB or USDF as margin assets. These are asset pairings that are more aligned with the BNB ecosystem and hence usage of these asset pairs would give you more points and further improve your airdrop odds. However, it's important to note that these Aster-native assets carry additional risks compared to established options like USDC and USDT, including smart contract risk and potential depeg scenarios.

Author’s Note

Airdrop farming tokenless perpetual DEXs boomed in late 2025 as users noted the typically generous airdrop allocation by perp DEXs. This generosity is perhaps enabled by the extremely high profit margins of these perp DEXs. As of writing, some other speculative perp DEX airdrop farm targets include Lighter and Pacifica.

OpenSea: The Original NFT Marketplace

Launched in 2017 on Ethereum, OpenSea is the first NFT marketplace, facilitating billions worth of trades during the NFT boom in 2021. Even with new market entrants such as Magic Eden and Blur, OpenSea still holds its position as the largest NFT marketplace as of Q3 2025.

Why an Airdrop Is Likely

OpenSea confirmed the launch of their SEA token on February 13 2025. The announcement confirms that historical and recent platform activity will be considered. After multiple delays, the team finally announced and confirmed that the SEA token will launch in Q1 2026. 

March 2026 update: The project rescinded on their promise of a Q1 2026 launch and instead delayed their token launch indefinitely, citing poor market conditions, for more info read here.

Improving Airdrop Eligibility

To improve airdrop eligibility, users can continue to trade NFTs on OpenSea in the lead up to the launch of SEA, preferably trading on accounts with long standing transaction history on OpenSea. Users can also consider owning NFTs from notable collections such as Pudgy Penguins, Moonbirds, Milady Maker, etc. as airdrops have historically been given to holders of notable NFT collections.

Meteora: Jupiter Owned Liquidity Market Maker

Meteora is a liquidity market maker on Solana, specializing in easy and quick creation of liquidity pools through its innovative Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker (DLMM) model. At the time of writing, Meteora currently holds over $964 million in TVL, making it the 10th largest DeFi protocol in Solana.

Why an Airdrop Is Likely

The Meteora team confirmed and launched the MET token via an airdrop on October 23, 2025. As of writing, MET season 2 is “ongoing but points are not viewable yet”, like many projects this means Meteora will continue to distribute their MET token to their platform users via multiple seasons of airdrops.

Improving Airdrop Eligibility

Users can improve their airdrop eligibility by consistently providing liquidity and generating fees. An efficient way to do this is to use volatile asset pairs such as memecoin liquidity providing as they generate more fees, however the risk for impermanent loss for this strategy is high.

The team has confirmed that for season 2 of the MET airdrop, the main consideration in airdrop points would be the total amount of fees generated from liquidity provision activities on Meteora.

Hyperliquid: World’s Largest Perpetuals Decentralized Exchange

Hyperliquid is a high performance Layer 1 dedicated to being a low slippage and extremely fast decentralized crypto trading platform. Hyperliquid prides itself as a DeFi (decentralized finance) platform with a CeFi-like (centralized finance) experience. Hyperliquid is well loved by the community and its users for being a reliable trading hub for all things crypto.

Why an Airdrop Is Likely

Hyperliquid’s first airdrop is phenomenally successful, being the largest ever in history (by market capitalization). HYPE’s tokenomics reveal that a further 38.88% of the HYPE token supply is allocated for “future emissions”, hinting that another airdrop season is in the works.

Improving Airdrop Eligibility

Users can improve airdrop eligibility by continuing to trade (with leverage) on the Hyperliquid platform as well as use its multitude of features such as staking, liquidity provision, and copytrading.

LayerZero S2: Fostering Interoperability Across Blockchains

LayerZero is an omnichain interoperability protocol that facilitates data and token transfers across blockchains seamlessly. A simple usage of LayerZero’s technologies include building blockchain bridges but more than that, LayerZero’s infrastructure facilitates building dApps that can interact across multiple blockchains as if they were on a single blockchain. Some of their innovations include their proprietary Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) and Omnichain Application (OApps) standards.

On February 11, 2026, the LayerZero team announced Zero, their very own Layer 1 blockchain network as well as strategic investments from Tether, the issuer of USDT. On top of this, the team announced that Citadel Securities and Ark Invest’s Cathie Woods would be joining their team as advisors. CEO Bryan Pellegrino confirmed that there would be no additional token and that ZRO would hold a meaningful stake in their new ventures.

Why an Airdrop Is Likely

LayerZero’s first airdrop season saw the project airdropping 8.5% of their token supply to community users. Alongside this airdrop their tokenomics further reveal that 38.3% of the total token supply has been earmarked for community distribution. This roughly translates to around 30% of ZRO tokens left to be distributed, which suggests that future airdrop seasons are likely to occur. 

Another hint is LayerZero CEO Bryan Pellegrino’s recent response to a post on X, where he urged users not to airdrop farm his project as he did not want to conduct yet another extensive sybil filtering process for future airdrop seasons. Ironically, this highly suggests that yet another airdrop season is in the works and his post has most likely encouraged more users to airdrop farm his project.

Improving Your Airdrop Eligibility

Bryan Pellegrino further mentioned in his post that he prefers “real usage only” suggesting that continued and genuine usage of LayerZero’s products will be sufficient to qualify for the airdrop. LayerZero’s core products include the Stargate bridge, the Aptos Bridge and many more. Read here for a full list of LayerZero’s partnerships to find out how you can interact with the project. It is also worth mentioning that LayerZero usage has drastically decreased since its first airdrop, meaning that future airdrop farmers who are successful will likely get a bigger share of the pie in future airdrop seasons.

Abstract Chain: Consumer Centric Blockchain From the Creators of Pudgy Penguins

Abstract is a Layer 2 blockchain developed by Igloo Inc., the parent company of Pudgy Penguins. Abstract is named after the computational concept of abstraction, which is the simplification of complex processes. Abstract’s name highlights their main goal which is to create a blockchain that is accessible with low barriers to entry. 

Abstract is built using zkSync's ZK stack and EigenDA on top of Ethereum and includes unique features such as the Abstract Global Wallet (AGW). AGW is a smart contract wallet that allows users to create blockchain wallets using emails and 2FA, doing away with the complexities that come with seed phrases.

Why an Airdrop Is Likely

After its launch in January 2025, Abstract introduced an XP points system, giving users points and badges for using and interacting with applications on the Abstract chain. While there is no official confirmation of an airdrop, a points system is often used by crypto projects to rank their users before their eventual crypto airdrop, suggesting that Abstract may do the same.

Improving Your Airdrop Eligibility

Besides earning XP and collecting badges, users have also speculated that holding the PENGU memecoin may give eligibility or a boost in token holdings. That being said, there is already an XP boost given through a Discord role for holders of the Pudgy Penguin NFT and PENGU holders.

Final Thoughts

We’ve gone through some likely drops for 2025, however, this list is non-exhaustive and there are no guarantees that the drops listed here will eventually happen. That said, there are recurring trends in what you can do to improve your eligibility, such as staying active in the space and interacting with the project. To discover new potential airdrops, check out our airdrop guides.

Finally, this content is provided for educational purposes and should not be taken as financial advice. Always do your own research before choosing to interact with any protocols or decentralized applications.