What's an Airdrop?

If you ask me, I had never heard of this term "airdrop" until I get acquainted with cryptocurrencies. I can understand the term water-drops or droplets but how about air-droplets! It doesn't make any sense na! Of course, when something is really dropped from air as in flood relief missions, airdropping makes sense. I don't know how it get applied to the free offerings of crypto-tokens.

But now I'm quite used to this termnology and since then, I've accumulated a variety of crypto-coins through airdrops, airgrabs, bounties, bonus or whatever you call it. It got to the point that I lost track of the name and no. of coins I own!

To this date, I've never sold or exchanged any airdrop coins. Mostly airdropped coins are very few in numbers and hardly worth anything at the time of airdrop. So I find it a waste of time to even put a sale bid on them in the markets.

There are some exchanges that have their own coins and regularly distribute their profit share proportionate to their coin holding in our exchange wallet. This way, I accumulated a number of coins whom I term as dust coins as they ain't even worth trading considering the trading fee and withdrawal fee of the exchanges.

Do you love airdrops?

Yet, I love airdrops. Why?
Perhaps, anything for FREE or in return of little effort makes me happy.

Initially, I wasn't very keen on airdrops. But at times, I used to claim some casually but was never serious of them. It so happened during the last crypto bull run, one of the coins I was holding jumped to $4 a piece. I vaguely recollected the name of that coin and thought I have got some of them. I checked up my account and found I had 200 of them with me. Now these were worth $800 of free money! That made me crazy. But I found that I haven't safely saved the keys to my wallet for that coin. Thus I couldn't access my wallet. $800 was a loss ...which I never earned anyway!

This incident taught me a good lesson. Firstly, don't ignore or under-rate all airdrop coins and secondly, keep keys to all wallet safe irrespective of their worth. In fact, after that incident, I allocated a couple of hours every weekend to do nothing but only claim various airdrops. However, I could continue that practice for a couple of weeks only.

How about adding my Referral Links in post-footer?

Today, I do claim some airdrops here and there. I also keep open the websites of some airdrops in my browser tabs, that I intend to claim when I find some free time. But mostly I miss deadlines for many of them. Sometimes when some of them perform well in the market, I have a feeling of a missed opportunity. But we need to understand that we can't find time and energy to grab everything available in the market even if it's for free. Sometimes, we forget claiming before the deadline.

I hope you too must have experienced something similar.

So I'm thinking to post my referral links to airdrops, exchanges and other services I subscribe to as my post footer. Thus if my readers are interested in any of them, they will get a handy link with my every post. Won't it be cool?

Of course, I know there are several resources, websites, groups, channels etc. to discover new airdrops but I'll only mention about a few.

NOIA Project

Today, I want to talk about NOIA airdrop.

You may recall that around a couple of weeks back I was researching about distributed computing. I was comparing coins like GRC, BBP, GBYTE and BOID. Although GRC + GBYTE mining looks very promising and rewarding to me; I finally settled for BOID due to ease of its installation. I'm planning to form my own BOID team and ease of initiating their app for a novice user was among my priority.

During this research, I came across this very new project called NOIA. NOIA network utilizes the distributed content delivery layer in order to increase the performance of internet everywhere in the world.

It utilizes spare bandwidth capacity from household computers throughout the world, to create a widely distributed caching layer. Thus serving the requested data from the nearest cached files and making it faster.

For last 2-3 weeks I started its node in my laptop. For running a node that maintains an uptime of 72 hours per week, they airdrop 200 NOIA tokens every week. Interstingly, I noticed that nothing has ever been downloaded or uploaded through my node and no bandwidth is being consumed. I reported this to NOIA and they replied that most nodes don't get any file in even months' time. This is just testnet and they need to push a file to the node when they require.

Now this was very interesting to me. So essentially, it's an interesting way to distribute airdrop tokens when they don't want to just give those away. Although their nodes are operating throughout the world, they are not enough in numbers. More the density of nodes, more the project will succeed by actually making the internet faster. So they are also giving away 40 tokens for referring a node.

My Referral Link

In case you are willing to get this 200 token per week airdrop, here's my referral link. You just need to download a small app and keep it running whenever you are online. If you can run it for 72 hours (counted every Friday), you will receive 200 tokens.