Airdrops are dead. 0 airdrops in 2026 😱

A year ago, I started saying that the retrodrop meta was dead.

They responded, "The market is simply clearing out."

And I was assuming that we weren't witnessing a reboot, but the death of the trend as we knew it.

Look at the crypto trade chart in the screenshot. The 2021 peak attracted a record $33.8 billion through 2,018 trades. That's more than all previous years combined. We're currently nearing the lows, and investment continues to decline without a full recovery. Although $BTC and crypto have risen overall since then.

It was the money from 2020–2022 that created the golden age of airdrops.

Aptos, Arbitrum, Optimism, Celestia, Blur, Hashflow, and dozens of other projects attracted huge amounts of capital and then redistributed some of the value among users. Even during the bear market, they continued to launch because they were spending the money raised several years earlier.

VC investments → several years of development → testnets and activities → token → redistribution of a portion of the value to the community. Drops always occurred with a delay relative to the venture cycle.

But this reserve gradually ran out.

Bitcoin has already reached new all-time highs, and venture capital investments in new crypto projects have never recovered. Capital is now flowing into AI, stocks, ETFs, stablecoins, exchanges, trading, and existing businesses, reaching users less and less.

And now it's 2026. Zero decent drops in 8 months! There simply aren't any!

Liquidity is the lifeblood of the market. When it stops flowing into new startups, the organism survives for a while on old reserves, and then the "organism" begins to die.

Should we be upset?

After CoinList, people also didn't know what to do. After NFTs, it seemed that such profitable opportunities would no longer exist. Now the retrodrop cycle is ending, and the market is once again forcing us to look for something new.

Over the past few years, I've been through almost every meta: token sales, nodes, NFTs, GameFi, automation and multi-accounting, testnets, DeFi, points, perpDEX, and prediction markets.

People who can't switch gears and feed off of one topic are among the first to be wiped out.

The skill lies in recognizing when the old wave has ended and riding the next one before the crowd.

We will definitely find the next opportunities, ride this wave, and, as always, we'll travel the entire path right before your eyes. He who does not seek will never find!