#AirdropSafetyGuide What is a cryptocurrency airdrop?

To understand the context, let's start by explaining what 'airdrop' means. This term is used in English to express dropping something from the air. It is a word of military and humanitarian origin, referring to the dropping of supplies, materials, or equipment from an aircraft in hard-to-reach areas or in emergency situations.

In the world of cryptocurrencies, this term is used metaphorically, of course. A cryptocurrency airdrop is a free distribution of tokens to users of a project. By 2024, this method has distributed over 26 billion USD in cryptocurrencies.

Some successful examples of airdrops include decentralized finance protocols, such as Uniswap, which in 2020 distributed 6.4 billion USD in UNI tokens; and networks like Arbitrum, the second layer of Ethereum, which in 2023 awarded 1.97 billion USD in ARB to selected users.