I Came for the Airdrop, But I Stayed for the Quality.

I'll be honest. My first interaction with @KernelDAO was purely mercenary. I remember the Binance Megadrop back in mid-2024, and my plan was the classic airdrop farmer's playbook: do the bare minimum on the quests, get the $KERNEL token allocation, and sell it as soon as it listed.

To complete the quests, I had to restake some BNB on $KERNEL . And that’s where the plan started to fall apart.

While my assets were staked, I got curious. I started reading about the problem Kernel was solving—making it cheaper and easier for new projects on BNB Chain to launch securely. It was a simple, powerful idea. The platform itself was smooth and worked flawlessly.

When the claim day came, I hesitated. Selling felt… wrong. I had a small stake in a project that was actually building something fundamental.

So, I decided to hold my airdrop as an experiment. I left my BNB in Kernel and even decided to try out Kelp, moving some ETH over to mint rsETH. I told myself I’d give it a quarter and see what happened.

That was over a year ago.

I’ve long since forgotten about the quick flip I had planned. My assets have been earning a reliable, layered yield ever since. I’ve watched rsETH become a blue-chip asset across multiple L2s. I even find myself reading the governance proposals now.

KernelDAO is one of the only projects that has ever managed to turn me from a cynical farmer into a genuine, long-term user. And it didn't do it with hype or promises, but by just having products that are incredibly well-built and effective. I guess that airdrop turned out to be one of the best investments I never intended to make.