It’s Sunday again, so it’s time for another throwback. Some of these stories I barely remember myself — I had to dig through the Wayback Machine and my own old blog posts to get specific answers this week. That’s exactly why I’m writing them down. We were on the edges of an evolving field — crypto, blockchain, airdrops — and these stories deserve to live on the internet somewhere. So in 20 years, someone can go back and read what actually happened in the early days.
Every quest platform you use today runs on the same playbook. Follow on X, join the Telegram, download the app, submit your wallet, verify, claim. Clean dashboards, instant verification, millions of users.
In 2017, we ran that exact playbook at AirdropAlert. Except nothing verified instantly, the dashboards were spreadsheets, and at one point my developer sat in Delhi traffic for two hours trying to reach the AWS office while a client screamed down my phone.
This is the story of exclusive airdrops — the campaigns we ran before the industry had a name for them. I’ve already told the story of how AirdropAlert started. This chapter is what happened when the aggregator became an operation.
What Was an Exclusive Airdrop?
A standard crypto airdrop back then was simple: a project gave tokens away, often just for holding a coin or signing up. Exclusives added a layer on top.
A project would come to us and say: we want to distribute tokens, but only to people who complete tasks. Follow our Twitter. Join our Telegram. Retweet the announcement. Submit your ETH address. In return, they got distribution, social growth, and a community before their token even existed.
Sound familiar? That’s a quest campaign. We just called it an exclusive airdrop, because the campaign ran exclusively through AirdropAlert — and you had to be a member of our community to get it.
I remember naming it. Sitting there with a spliff, turning it over: we run this thing ourselves, people need to be community members, how do I make it stand out on the site? How do I make it sound special? Exclusive. Exclusive airdrops. Done.
Then the branding budget got spent — all of it. Remember, the site was still a simple one-pager with an airdrop list. I told my dev: make the exclusive airdrops our AA blue, so they jump out of the list immediately. That was the whole go-to-market. A name and a color. And that’s how it blew up. You can still see the blue in the BRD screenshot below — that “AirdropAlert Exclusive” ribbon in the corner was the color doing its job.
Dumb term, honestly. But it stuck. And when competitors copied the idea and started signing their own clients, they called theirs “exclusive airdrops” too. Think about that one for a second — an exclusive airdrop, running exclusively through somebody else’s website. The name only made sense on ours. They took it anyway. That’s usually the moment you know you named the category.
We ran the first ones in 2017. By 2018 it was a machine. Here’s the distribution log from that year:
Nine campaigns, start dates, distribution dates, all checked off. And here’s the thing: that table only shows distributions completed at the moment the page was captured. Campaigns still running didn’t appear yet, plenty ran before the page existed, and plenty more came after. All in all, we completed the exclusive airdrop service for over 50 projects. This wasn’t a one-off experiment. It was an operation.
From Google Forms to Our Own Machine
The first two exclusives ran on Google Forms. I’m not embarrassed about that — you ship with what you have. But Google Forms had limitations, and I wanted the whole flow on our own site.
So my developer in India and I built our own campaign pages. Entry forms, task lists, the works. Here’s what one looked like:
Look at the task stack on that form. Email, Telegram join, Twitter follow, a retweet, two Facebook likes, wallet address, terms, KYC checkbox. That’s a 2018 quest campaign in one frame. Also notice the sneaky one: “Like Official AirdropAlert on Facebook.” Every client campaign grew our own socials too. No shame in the game.
The Verification Problem
The next step was obvious: verify the tasks automatically. We hooked into the Facebook and Twitter APIs to check follows and joins in real time.
The APIs said no.
Social media APIs in 2017 were not built for 5,000 people hitting them through one integration. We ran into call limits almost immediately. The servers held, the API calls didn’t, and the form would crash mid-campaign.
My fix was elegant in the way duct tape is elegant. When verification crashed, I toggled it off. No verification at all — just join, drop your handle, done. Then we ran manual checks after the fact: scrape the follower list, compare it against the entries, remove the cheaters. A lot more work. We did it anyway.
Eventually we accepted the truth: social APIs simply weren’t made for these campaigns yet. We removed the automated verification project entirely and stuck with manual checks. The right idea, running about three years ahead of the tools it needed.
5,000 Visitors in Minutes
When an exclusive went live, we’d get 5,000 visitors within minutes. Our newsletter and socials pointed at one page, all at once. Server load was a constant battle.
Which brings me to my favorite ops story of that era. During one campaign, the site started buckling, and my dev had a plan: a friend of his worked at the AWS office in Delhi. He’d drive over and get our servers pumped up directly.
If you know Delhi traffic, you already know how this ends. He got stuck for two hours. Meanwhile I had a stressed-out client on the phone demanding to know why his campaign page kept going offline. So I did what years of poker taught me — kept a flat voice, told him “we’ve got it handled,” and hammered the dev chat between sentences. The client never heard a thing in my voice. The dev heard plenty.
BRD: The Biggest Name
BRD wasn’t our biggest campaign by entries — we ran exclusives that pulled 50,000 to 100,000 members. But it was the biggest brand that ever signed with us. BRD (Bread Wallet) was already a big name in the industry, and they wanted something no airdrop had required before: an app download as a task.
Nobody had gated an airdrop behind an app install. There was no API to verify one either. But I wanted the campaign — a name like that on our client list mattered — so we said yes and figured out the verification the hard way.
We solved it from two angles. The form demanded a BRD Rewards ID and the app’s ETH address — values you could only obtain from inside the app after configuring the wallet, so the data itself proved the install. On top of that, we cross-matched our entrants’ emails against BRD’s app-signup list by hand. Matching emails got the drop. A VLOOKUP standing in for infrastructure that wouldn’t exist for years.
We ran the campaign over four phases in four weeks, with limited spots per round to keep urgency high — “last spots for round 2” and so on. And we ran daily calls throughout. BRD would show up on Skype with five people; on my side of the call, just me, tweaking details on the fly. One of my favorite mechanics came out of those calls, and I can’t take credit for it: the BRD team suggested that referrals shouldn’t pay a flat reward to the referrer, but boost the reward for the entire pool of participants. Everybody benefited from every referral, so the whole community started recruiting. We built it, it worked beautifully, and pool-boost referrals are a standard quest mechanic today. Good ideas came from both sides of that call.
The results: over 40,000 entries, BRD’s first 50,000 app store downloads inside four weeks, and more than 40,000 new social followers. All driven through a site I built while travelling, with a form that was barely battle tested. We even published a screen-recorded walkthrough of the signup flow — the full 2018 experience, preserved.
Spencer Chen, BRD’s VP of Global Marketing at the time, put it like this in our case study: AirdropAlert gave them massive reach to the right audience and “a flexible platform to run the exact airdrop campaign that we needed.” A client VP called us a platform in 2018. I rest my case on the whole quest thing.
The Private Key Problem
Adding wallet-address fields to the forms taught us a lesson within 30 minutes of the first one going live.
People were submitting their private keys.
Not one or two people. A steady stream of users pasting the one string of characters you must never share, into a form on the internet, to receive free tokens. We scrambled to build validation rules on the fly — must start with 0x, must match the address format — and rejected everything else.
Look back at that Carboneum form above. The wallet field says “ETH address (No exchange wallet!)” and the placeholder text reads “Ethereum PUBLIC key.” Nobody writes PUBLIC in capital letters on a form unless they’ve learned something painful. That label is scar tissue.
Here’s the context younger readers might miss: connecting a wallet wasn’t a thing yet. MetaMask existed, but the “Connect Wallet” button every platform relies on today did not. If it had, we would have added it in a heartbeat and the whole private key circus never happens. Instead, the only option was a raw text field and a prayer. Quest platforms today inherited a solved problem.
The KYC Battle
Behind the scenes, one negotiation repeated with almost every project: when to run KYC.
Projects wanted KYC upfront, at signup. I pushed back every time. Put KYC at claim, I told them. Let the funnel fill up first. You’ll get your compliance, and you’ll get a much bigger campaign — because if you demand documents on day one, half your entrants bounce before they start.
They usually listened. And I always knew what came next: a steep drop-off on KYC day, when the tourists ghost and the real claimers push through. That’s conversion funnel thinking applied to token distribution, and it’s how basically every claim process works today.
The Emailer Nobody Else Had
Running exclusive airdrops meant collecting a lot of emails. Which created a problem you might find hard to imagine now: Mailchimp and the other email providers blocked crypto senders. All of them. Crypto was radioactive to email platforms in those days.
So we built our own. The first version went live around December 2017, and we fine-tuned it through early 2018. AWS on the backend, a frontend that looked like something from the stone-age internet — genuinely ugly, and sadly I can’t find a screenshot anywhere in my folders. But it did the job. I could load an email list from an Excel file, drop in an HTML email, add a title, and bulk send. 500,000 emails in about five minutes.
At its peak, the list held over a million addresses. We rarely blasted the full size, though — we constantly scrubbed out the junk emails, because a clean list of 500k beats a dirty list of a million every day of the week. List hygiene before anyone in crypto used the word deliverability.
That emailer was our biggest weapon. Nobody in crypto could bulk email like we did, because nobody would let crypto companies email at all. Nowadays every provider accepts crypto and the whole thing sounds trivial. Back then, it was a moat we welded together ourselves.
That was the pattern of the entire era, really. Every single problem, we built our own solution.
Final Words
In a different universe, we could have been Galxe or Zealy. That’s not bravado — the proof of concept existed, the MVP existed, and 50+ projects had paid for it. The demand was proven. All I had to do was double down: raise money, hire a real technical team, and build the thing out properly.
Instead, the first bear market hit, and I had to scale down. I was in survival mode, not build-the-next-platform mode. And honestly, I was fatigued by the whole startup life. When I weighed it up, I would rather scale down and focus on content than grind out a quest platform. In hindsight, that was exactly the moment to go hard. Hindsight is cheap, though.
I’ll also cut myself some slack on the prediction side. I couldn’t have known MetaMask would put a connect button in every browser, that Discord would become crypto’s living room, or that the social APIs would mature enough to handle this kind of traffic. The manual machine we ran — scraped follower lists, cross-matched email exports, verification toggled off mid-crisis — every piece of it eventually got replaced by an API call. The quest platforms didn’t out-think the idea. They just arrived when the infrastructure finally existed.
So no bitterness. Being too early looks identical to being wrong, right up until someone else proves you were right. But I still think they owe us that bottle of whiskey. I like the Japanese kind — a Yamazaki 18 will settle the debt nicely.
Want more stories from the trenches? The full collection lives in the Morten crypto archives.
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