I’ve said this on many podcasts, but imo it’s VERY hard in this environment to start with a token airdrop and expect a long-term community to form around it, unless you do something truly very special.
The sad reality is 99% of airdrop farmers don’t care about anything other than the airdrop itself, and many token project creators don’t care about much other than being able to liquidate their tokens when they unlock (or effectively lock it in by shorting perps).
And btw that’s not to mention VC unlocks on top of that too.
The best performing “airdrop” token of late has clearly been Hyperliquid and guess what, it was something that launched with no VCs and the founders have put everything back into the business.
I think lots of people initially wrote of
$REKT as “just another consumer to earn project that will fail”, but they did not consider some major points:
1. Our community had already existed for 3 years and were already die hard, it meant that initial airdrops went to people who had demonstrated multi-year loyalty and felt more inclined to hold and be a part of something.
2. The initial idea of
@rektdrinks was not just a “get rich quick” scheme for myself (in a rare moment of stating it bluntly it’s not like I need to), but I just felt like Rekt had massive potential to be something bigger and I wanted to do something cool that would turn heads.
3. When we raised capital, it was small, and we had no VCs and no cliff/vesting period. It meant whoever wanted to sell could sell day 1, we’d have natural price discovery, and then be able to see a path to upside, rather than looming VC unlocks from day 1.
Even tho we are down like 80% from ATHs, we are still up 700% from our starting price roughly a year ago.
I often palm things off as “we did it by accident” - and I’d say that’s largely true for the majority of the journey up until a year ago. Since then everything is intentional, carefully planned, and there is still a lot more to come.
$REKT
Airdrop farmers are the single worst possible foundation for a community (except for maybe 'gaming' airdrop farmers)
They're all mercenary gaslighters who will literally turn the barrel around on you the *instant* you suggest that they'll get less than they think they deserve
And they all think they deserve way more than they're worth because we conditioned them for 4 years to believe that spamming random txns on testnets or playing the role of gm scientist in discord for a few months somehow produced economic value in the 4-5 figure
skin in the game or gtfo is the path forward