It’s a bear market. The World Cup is nearly over. And I’m on a solo trip in Iceland, staring at waterfalls with no charts open for once.
Funny detail: Iceland is where airdrop history began. Back in March 2014, Auroracoin distributed tokens to every Icelandic citizen — the first crypto airdrop ever. So here I am, twelve years later, walking around the birthplace of airdrops while running the site that turned them into an industry. You can’t script that.
Trips like this send you down memory lane. Earlier this week, I dug through some of our oldest blogs. One of them, our guide on ways to earn crypto, pulled over 500,000 reads back in the day. Why? Because it taught something new, something people were hungry for. Reading it again made me laugh out loud. It still mentioned “Bitcoin spinners.” Remember those? Exactly. So I rewrote the whole thing for 2026 — you can read the updated version here.
Going through that old content brought me all the way back. Back to why AirdropAlert started, and how we grew. Most farmers grinding testnets today weren’t around in 2017. They’ve never heard the real story. And since it’s a bear market and we’ve all got time, let me tell it. The story of how we had to force our will onto projects and spoon-feed users how to claim tokens.
Before AirdropAlert: The Information Gap
My first airdrop ever was Stellar Lumens. All I had to do was prove I held Bitcoin, and free XLM landed in my wallet. Later came Byteball, which dropped tokens monthly based on your BTC holdings. It got so good that friends would send me their Bitcoin just so I could claim and sell for them. Wild times.
Here’s the thing, though. Nobody knew these airdrops existed. There was no central place to find them. No guides, no alerts, no aggregators. If you weren’t deep in the right Bitcointalk threads, you missed out on free money. That information gap bothered me. So in June 2017, I launched AirdropAlert.com, the world’s first crypto airdrop aggregator.
One small problem.
The Supply Problem Nobody Talks About
I built a website to list airdrops. Then I discovered there weren’t enough airdrops to list.
Let that sink in. Today, farmers complain about too many airdrops to track. In 2017, I had an aggregator with an empty queue. Google Trends barely registered the term “crypto airdrop” back then. Projects didn’t run airdrops because they didn’t know what airdrops were, and there weren’t enough users to claim them. Can you believe that?
So the site couldn’t just wait for supply. We had to create it.
Chiang Mai, a Spliff, and Two Changs
Picture the scene. Chiang Mai, late 2017, the digital nomad capital of the world. A Dutch ex-poker player sitting with a spliff, two Chang beers, and a laptop. That night, I sent five cold emails to ICO projects with the same pitch: run an airdrop through us.
The pitch itself was a half-bluff. I told projects it was simple — just send me the tokens and the gas, and I’d handle the distribution to users. In reality, we were figuring it out as we went. We collected entries through forms and manually filtered out the spam, wallet by wallet. Spoon-feeding users how to claim wasn’t a figure of speech. We literally wrote step-by-step instructions for people who had barely set up their first wallet.
One of those five emails changed everything.
November 14, 2017: The Drop Contract
Oyster Pearl (PRL) said yes. On November 14, 2017, our distribution contract went live on Ethereum. The function was literally called Drop. You can still find it on-chain today — that’s the beauty of blockchain. The receipts never expire.
Then PRL did something we didn’t plan for. It mooned. Participants who claimed roughly 2,200 PRL through our campaign saw their free tokens run to $8,000–$10,000 each at the top. Free money, life-changing for some.
Our fee for that first campaign? 100,000 PRL. I sold on the way up and banked around $70,000, never catching the exact top. That first fee validated everything. A kid from Nijmegen, sending cold emails from Thailand, had just proven that airdrops could be an industry. The beers in Nijmegen are still flowing on that story eight years later.
Full transparency, because we keep it factual around here: Oyster Pearl later rugged in one of crypto’s most infamous exit scams. Does that taint the story? No. You can judge a project before launch — the team, the tech, the tokenomics. Anything after launch depends on human decisions outside anyone’s control. Oyster was a great first run with an unlucky ending.
Besides, the campaigns that followed proved the model. Our early exclusive airdrops included Bread Wallet, later known as BRD, a name that held up so well that Coinbase eventually acquired it. Another one was CEEK, which went on to build an actual metaverse in 2022 and stuck around for years. One rug, several survivors. That’s a better hit rate than most VCs managed in 2017.
Acorn Phase Airdrops: The Grandpa of Season Airdrops
Here’s the part almost nobody knows. In March 2018, we launched something called Phase Airdrops with a project named Acorn. The concept: split one airdrop into multiple capped phases instead of one open claim.
Our official reasoning at the time was operational. Phases gave ICOs time to process incoming traffic. But then Phase 1 filled up in six hours. Phase 2 filled in three. We had designed it for load management and accidentally discovered scarcity marketing. The “you got in before it closed” feeling did more for engagement than any banner ever could.
Now swap the vocabulary. Replace “phase” with “season” and “cap” with “allocation.” Sound familiar? You’ve just described every points program and season-based airdrop running in 2026. Phase Airdrops were the grandpa of season airdrops, seven years early. The original concept post is still archived if you want proof.
Here’s the part I’m quietly proud of. When the biggest reference sites on the internet explain what an airdrop is, they lean on our work.
Investopedia cites our blog post on the first crypto airdrop in history, quote and link included, as the source for how it all began with Auroracoin in 2014. Think about that. The internet’s go-to finance encyclopedia traces airdrop history through a post we wrote years ago.
It doesn’t stop there. Grokipedia, the AI-built encyclopedia, cites four of our blog posts as sources on airdrop history — including the first-airdrop post that anchors its section on airdrop origins. Meanwhile, BitcoinWiki’s airdrop article is a near word-for-word copy of my original 2017 “what is an airdrop” explainer. You can still spot my first-person “I think” phrasing frozen inside a wiki article. Someone copied our homework so thoroughly that it became the encyclopedia entry.
We didn’t just report on airdrop history. We wrote it, and the references prove it.
From Forced Will to Full Industry
From those five cold emails, things compounded. More projects said yes. Campaigns turned into dozens of campaigns. The site that once had an empty queue has now curated over 6,000 airdrops and published more than 1,000 blogs.
The industry professionalized around us, too. Airdrops went from marketing gimmick to core token distribution strategy. Uniswap made them famous. Arbitrum made them enormous. Hyperliquid made them legendary. And through every cycle, bull or bear, the core idea from 2017 held up: free tokens are the best marketing in crypto.
If you’re farming today, you’re standing on rails we laid with forms, manual spam-filtering, and step-by-step claim guides. Not bragging, just history. Someone had to force projects to try this.
Final Words
Bear markets are for building, but they’re also for remembering. Every giant season airdrop you farm today traces back to a spliff, two Changs, and five cold emails from Chiang Mai. That’s why we’re archiving the receipts — the original contract, the Phase Airdrop posts, the transactions — on the Wayback Machine alongside this post. Blockchains don’t forget, and now the internet won’t either.
If this story was before your time, welcome. Browse our latest airdrops and start farming. And if you were around since 2017 — you already know. You claimed free money because we spoon-fed you the instructions. You owe me a beer. 🍻
FAQ
When did AirdropAlert launch?
AirdropAlert.com launched in June 2017 as the world’s first crypto airdrop aggregator. Since then, we’ve curated over 6,000 airdrops.
What was the first airdrop campaign AirdropAlert ran?
Our first distribution campaign was for Oyster Pearl (PRL). The smart contract went live on Ethereum on November 14, 2017, and is still visible on-chain. The project later collapsed in an exit scam, but the campaign itself proved airdrops could work as a marketing model.
What was the first crypto airdrop in history?
The first widely recognized crypto airdrop was AuroraCoin in 2014, distributed to citizens of Iceland. Early holder-based airdrops like Stellar Lumens and Byteball followed, rewarding Bitcoin holders.
What are Phase Airdrops?
Phase Airdrops were a distribution model AirdropAlert pioneered in 2018 with the Acorn campaign, splitting one airdrop into multiple capped phases. The model was the precursor to today’s season-based airdrops.
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