Polymath did an airdrop (free coins) worth $300

In December 2017, I signed up to learn more about a coin called Polymath. As I learned more about it, my interest peaked and I wanted to learn how to get my hands on some of the coins. Turns out, the coins weren’t available yet; in fact, the team wasn’t even doing an ICO. Instead, they were conducting an airdrop. I signed up for it, and didn’t have to pay a penny (only enter some identifying information to comply with KYC regulation). A month later, 250 POLY showed up in my Ethereum Wallet. As of the time of writing, that’s worth around $300.

What is an Airdrop?

The simple answer: it’s literally just free coins just waiting for you. The method behind the madness, though, is a decision regarding marketing strategy. As a way to spread awareness to the relevant audience of potential investors and eventual enthusiasts, coin teams will, from time-to-time, do airdrops.

A Brief History of Airdrops

Coins have been doing this for a while — pretty much since the first Ethereum ICO. If you check your wallet on Etherscan (which I totally recommend doing — never open your wallet with a private key just to check your balance, it’s riskier than necessary), you’ll know there’s a row up top named Token Tracker. If you see it, then there are also tokens in your account; if you don’t, then you don’t have any tokens or airdrops — yet. Some of you ETH wallet holders that have had wallets with balances for a while now might’ve noticed this — one day you just see an extra random token in your Token Tracker. No, someone didn’t randomly deposit some obscure token into your wallet address on accident; instead, the coin’s team decided to send a small amount to a population of Ethereum wallets in order to spread the word.

After getting the token, one of the first things you might’ve done is Google what the coin is. Or you might’ve taken it a step further — asked someone else if they knew what the token was. Also, you could just choose to ignore it. Of course, in the last scenario, the airdrop failed its intention. But scenario 1 means that you have now learned about the coin, and scenario 2 is even better — you’ve just told your friends about the coin, too. In both of those scenarios, the airdrop did its job for a small price (well, potentially a larger price if it moons).

Eventually, airdrops became a method beyond marketing. As a method to pump coin value, coins would announce airdrops where coin holders would receive bonus coins proportional to the amount of total coins they hold. Coin investors that wanted to get the airdrop would have to buy the coins if they didn’t have any yet, or buy more if they wanted a larger proportion of the airdrop. That being said, I want to emphasize that this airdrop strategy won’t be examined further in this article, since my article is focused on how you can get coins for free, not on how you can get coins by buying coins.

Recently, with Facebook’s new advertising policy explicitly stating bans for ICOs, many ICOs have turned to airdrops as an alternative method for pay-per-click advertising. With many ICOs being consumer-focused products, they focus on one metric: viral growth through the network effect. In layman’s terms, they want to spread the word to you and hope that you spread the word to your minions, too. They address this by using a strong referral system method.

Participating in Free Airdrops

The Tools You’ll Most Likely Need

Here’s what you need to catch airdrops like a stud

1. An Ethereum Wallet:
   Not one that is on an exchange. It has to be a personal address that is ERC20 compatible because most of the tokens that are airdropped are ERC20 tokens, which are or were originally Ethereum-based ICOs. I suggest using MetaMask or MyEtherWallet to get started immediately, but in the long-term I always recommend getting a hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano S.
2. The Ethereum Wallet Must be ACTIVE.
   By active, I mean that you have to show at least some human use of it. Lots of airdrops have checks in place to make sure that you aren’t just randomly generating a bunch of addresses and signing them all up to unfairly obtain more coins. This means that if your wallet doesn’t show activity, it might not receive the airdrop. Sometimes, coins will be explicit in what they look for, including some type of balance in the account.
3. A Telegram Account :
   I’m sure there are amazing reasons why Telegram is the chatting tool of choice for many of these ICOs. The coins want to boost the audience count. Usually, these airdrop coins will also require you to sign up for their Telegram accounts. Until you receive the coin in your Ethereum wallet, do not leave the Telegram accounts or you risk disqualification for the airdrop.
4. A Twitter Account :
   Similar to the reasons behind the Telegram account, many of the airdrop coins will also require you to follow them on Twitter. Some of them will even ask you to retweet some tweet.
5. An email address.
   Sometimes airdrops will ask for your email, too. If you don’t feel comfortable with giving them your real email, just create a spam one. Remember the password, though; some of them actually ask you to confirm your email.

Obtaining and Withdrawing Tokens

Usually, it takes about 1–2 months after the end of the airdrop before you receive your tokens. This is primarily due to the fact that many airdrops occur before or during token sales, in conjunction to spread awareness. And tokens are not distributable until the end of a token sale anyway (I’ll write a separate piece on Token Sales, or ICOs).

To check your wallet info and see if the token has appeared in your wallet yet, just go to Etherscan (https://www.etherscan.io). Type in your ETH address into the search box.

Circled in Red is the area you want to look. If the token is available in your wallet already, it will show up in the token tracker dropdown. If you don’t have a token tracker appear on your result, then you don’t have any tokens in your wallet yet, and it also means you didn’t receive it. Once you actually obtain the tokens, you can withdraw them directly through a services like My Ether Wallet (MEW). All you have to do is access your wallet (through MetaMask, Ledger Nano, or some other way — direct private key pasting is not recommended) and select the token you want to withdraw.

Don’t Get Scammed

With all the promises of free coins out there, it’s easy to lose track of everything and just start a clicking frenzy. Here are some tips to avoid getting scammed:

1. Never send any private keys.
   No one needs to have your private key in order to be able to check you wallet balance. They can do so very easily with tools like Etherscan.
2. Don’t send any money to any addresses.
   Remember this — airdrops are free. Whether it requires you to be holding a certain coin, or if it’ll just appear in your wallet, an airdrop will never ask you to send any amount of some coin to some type of address. If they ask for this, steer away immediately.
3. Check official sources.
   If a coin is actually doing an airdrop, it is likely they’ll have announced it on their official social media accounts, such as Twitter. Check there to make sure that the airdrop is official; otherwise, you might be subject to a scam with scammers trying to collect your data.

This is an example of a scam airdrop. The first red flag is the fact that the Twitter account is asking you for an amount. But these scammers have become pretty sophisticated. If you check the comments, you’ll see there are 8 responses to this. 7 of them are from fake Twitter accounts pretending to have participated and being “super stoked” about receiving their coins. The other one is from me, tweeting that it’s a scam to try to warn people.

If you look at the Twitter account, you might see that it has 3,000 followers (or maybe even more) but the tweet history is less than 24 hours long. Does that make sense? A coin that just supposedly raised 8m euros has only tweeted for 24 hours? If the story seems fishy, there is a disgusting, rotting corpse somewhere. Don’t believe it.

The image is a terrible Photoshop job with font that doesn’t match the rest of the announcement. This scam is a metropolis of red flags. A simple Reverse Google Image Search shows that the logo actually belongs to Thrive. As a best practice, always look for reasons why an Airdrop would be a scam. With that mindset, you are more likely to be able to sniff out the rotting fish from the sushi.

Resources to Help You Find Airdrops

There are many communities and newsletters available to help you with identifying airdrops as they come along. I definitely recommend signing up for them (they’re free), rather than trying to look for them yourself. That’s because there are many scammers out there, and they make themselves very present and legitimate-seeming. These resources that you subscribe to have (hopefully) already screened the airdrops.

Let Cosmic Trading help you find those awesome Airdrops

If you’re looking for one to join right now, take a look at Cosmic Trading. Members post airdrops in that channel that they’ve already verified are legitimate. Furthermore, the community is just a huge group of cryptocurrency traders and enthusiasts with experience levels ranging from years of trading and HODLing to people who just started yesterday.

Article Produced By
Kenny Li

A Blockchain and Fintech Enthusiast. Founder of Worthyt, Managing Partner at Empyrean Global Advisors. MIT Sloan Class of 2020.

https://hackernoon.com/wtf-is-an-airdrop-a-detailed-guide-to-free-cryptocurrency-e70e8777dd83

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

What are Airdrops and how can you take advantage of them?

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Defining the Difference Between Faucets and Airdrops

You may or may not have heard of these before, but there are things called faucets and airdrops. These are legitimate ways to get free coins, but there are definitely some things you need to know about each. In terms of faucets, services set up to give you tiny amounts of free coins. You can hit up these services periodically, subject to minimum withdrawal limits, because some coins have high fees. This doesn’t make sense if you’re trying to withdraw a super-tiny amount; the fees will eat up all of it.

One can access faucets at certain sites or mobile apps, as well. The reasons people set them up include:

• to promote a particular coin to get you interested in it
• to drive traffic to a site
• to get ad revenue from you, or other similar benefits

On the other hand, airdrops are a process in which you can receive free coins (most of the time) from a specific project or team that runs a different coin. They take a snapshot of the blockchain — for example, a snapshot of the Ethereum blockchain at a certain time — and then everyone who has Ethereum will get a certain amount of coins deposited automatically into their ERC20 wallet.

What Is an Airdrop?

It’s well known that people are getting free crypto airdrops in order to trade them and make money. If we think about the concept of an airdrop in the non-crypto context, we can easily understand how it works in the crypto context. In the non-crypto context, airdrops are used to deliver food and supplies in boxes to people you cannot reach in other ways. They are normally dropped from airplanes with attached parachutes so they reach people on the ground safely.

In the crypto context, airdrops are used to distribute crypto assets, such as coins and tokens, as widely as possible to encourage people to start using them. These assets can become valuable, causing many people to become interested in receiving airdrops and trading them. This may sound like people are getting free valuable coins, but that’s not a correct statement — not all of them are valuable. You may think the easiest thing to do is to get all the airdrops and hope that some of them become valuable. If this thought comes to mind, you may wish to consider an old marketing proverb. If you are not paying for a product, then you are the product.

What does this mean? It normally means that you end up giving your contact details (or more) to the people providing the airdrops. That may be something you are happy with; however, not all projects are legitimate. This means that you should protect yourself. You can do this by using different email addresses and passwords for any crypto-related accounts you set up. You should also use two-factor authentication on accounts, if possible. The last bit of security advice is you should never share your private key. If anybody ever asks you for this, do not trust them.

How to Participate in Airdrops?

To participate in the airdrops, you need a couple of different things.

1. An Ethereum-based wallet. Why Ethereum? Because most ICOs usually run ERC20 Ethereum tokens.
2. An active balance on MyEtherWallet.
3. Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram accounts so you can share ICO marketing info.

Who Can Take Part in an Airdrop?

Whoever distributes an airdrop gets to decide who can take part in the airdrop. Earlier approaches were based upon whether or not a person already owned some crypto assets, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and so on. As these assets have become more expensive and interest in crypto assets has increased, people have been using a number of alternative methods. One method involves requesting contact details such as email addresses, which point to BitcoinTalk, profile details, Twitter handles, Telegram, usernames, etc.

This forum (BitcoinTalk) gives people the opportunity to:

• ask the founders questions about the project
• determine whether the project is legitimate in order to maximize the number of airdrops in which you can participate

The most common method now is to reward airdrop applicants for retweeting certain tweets with irrelevant hashtags, or making posts on Facebook. This means that airdrop participants join the airdrop by performing promotional work. This also blurs the boundary between airdrops and bounties, which ranges from social media activity to language translations. Once these wallets are downloaded, people who want the airdrop are requested to submit their wallet addresses as evidence that they have downloaded the wallet. This enables the airdrop to be made. This method is often used by proof-of-stake coins to build stronger networks.

How Does an Airdrop Reach People?

An airdrop reaches an individual applying for the airdrop when it is sent to the individual’s address. It is possible for an individual to have many addresses. If you’ve downloaded a machine wallet, then the airdrop can be sent there. Depending on the support that the crypto asset has, you may be able to send your crypto assets to a mobile wallet, which will function like an app on your mobile phone. You may also be able to store the crypto asset on a hardware wallet, such as Treasurer or Ledger. There are a number of third-party web wallets available that can be used for receiving crypto assets. Many airdrops are for crypto assets built on the Ethereum platform, and these often require people to use MyEtherWallet or other similar wallets. If an airdrop application form asks you to share in wallet address, you should first set up a MyEtherWallet or other similar service in order to receive your airdrop.

Some airdrops use a proprietary approach, and have their own web wallets. Normally, such projects intend to build dedicated wallets, which can be accessed offline, too. Before that happens, they simply store them on their website so you can see the balance as you log into your account. Another place you may receive an airdrop is on an exchange where people trade crypto assets. This often happens when an airdrop is based upon existing crypto asset holdings, such as how much Bitcoin or Ethereum one owns. Airdropping new crypto assets directly to exchange addresses is relatively rare.

What Should You Do Once You Get Crypto-Assets?

Once you receive crypto assets, you may end up wondering what to do with them. Should you hold onto them for the long term, or should you sell them immediately? To decide, do your own research to gain an understanding of the long-term potential. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer. The Crypto Freebies channel is not qualified to give investment advice, and therefore, you may want to consider getting professional advice.

If you do decide to sell them, you will need to be registered on the exchange where your crypto assets are traded, unless you decide to sell directly to someone, which can be risky if they are not known to you. There are a number of exchanges where crypto assets can be found. These exchanges are some of the smaller ones, where new crypto assets seek to list first before moving on to larger exchanges, such as Bittrex.

Conclusion

A coin airdrop is a double-win situation. On the one hand, you get free crypto tokens that could be worth something in the future. On the other hand, blockchain projects raise awareness for their crypto-projects during their ico airdrop.
In this way, companies are able to create a community around their coin. Indeed, if you give someone a coin, he/she will likely get involved, and will get some money out of it. This is a means of creating a customer database at a low price.

Article Produced By
Applicature
A Blockchain development agency focusing on production ready solutions, smart contracts Technologies, Cryptocurrencies and Technical ICO support.

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Airdrops In Cryptocurrencies: Everything A Beginner Needs To Know

There are several ways of making money from cryptocurrencies

but not all are secure and legit ways. However, one genuine way of earning through cryptocurrencies is AIRDROPS. At CoinSutra, our endeavor is always to find out such safe ways for our audience, which we have done a number of times. We have also helped the community in claiming such Airdrops on more occasions than one. Some of you reading this concept of ‘Airdrops’ for the first time might ask what Airdrop is. And this is exactly our agenda today – to discuss everything about Airdrops. So in this analysis, we are broadly going to touch upon the following points:

• What Is A Crypto Airdrop?
• Why Free Crypto Airdrops?
• How To Stay Updated About Such Crypto Airdrops?
• How To Get Your Free Airdropped Crypto?
• Conclusion: Stay Updated & Stay Safe While Airdrops

What Is Airdrop in Crypto World?

An airdrop for a cryptocurrency is a procedure

of distributing new tokens/coins by awarding them in a certain proportion to existing holders of a particular blockchain currency, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum etc. In simple terms, if you HODL one type of coin, you are automatically eligible to claim other coins/tokens just because you were holding the parent coins/tokens on which airdrop is being done.

That is why this method of coin/token distribution is called airdrops signifying ‘free droppings’. Sometimes, there are different reasons and motivations for these airdrops such as forks, marketing, decentralization & distribution etc. There are other reasons too of which we will talk about later in the article.

Why Do Free Crypto Airdrops Occur?

There are several motivations for carrying out cryptocurrency airdrops, right from creating the hype and buzz to actually distributing the whole supply of coins/tokens. Some of the reasons for carrying out crypto airdrops are:

• Even Distribution Of Total Token Supply

One proper reason for airdrops is to evenly distribute the total token/coin supply so that there is less centralization in terms of bagHODLer holding a large sum with themselves. Omise gave away five percent of their OmiseGO cryptocurrency to holders of Ethereum in September 2017. In this case, OmiseGO took the advantage of already distributed Ethereum economy to distribute their tokens too.

• Rewarding Faithful Early Investors

Many cryptocurrencies want to reward its early supporters and investors who first bought their ICOs or tokens. What better way to reward them than by offering them some more new tokens – for free.

This also motivates early investors to hold their parent tokens for longer durations and overall I feel it is a good way of rewarding.

Just like this:

• Awareness About The New Crypto

Many times, just for spreading awareness, the airdrops are carried out for the HODLers of popular cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Walton etc.

• Marketing & Hype

This is the most common trend nowadays. Airdropping coins/tokens for the purpose of marketing and collecting leads for further business opportunity expansion.

You will also find projects running schemes such as:

1. (TEU) is airdropping 125.000 USD in TEU tokens to first 15,000 airdrop participants!
2. Get up to 60 REPU tokens free just by joining Telegram!
3. #ApolloDAE referral airdrop for Telegram users!
4. 50 SYN tokens free when you sign up!

So this a kind of airdrop cum bounties for doing minor tasks like signups, referrals or joining Telegram and following on Twitter etc.

• Hard Forks

Another popular way is to fork popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Monero and create a new coin, to be distributed to existing holders of these parent coins. CoinSutra has supported few airdrops that happened in the past through such forks, some of which were:

1. Bitcoin Cash
2. Bitcoin Gold
3. Bitcoin Diamond
4. Litecoin Cash

Now the million dollar question – How to know about such airdrops? Good question, considering it is one of the easiest ways to make money.

How To Stay Updated On Such Crypto Airdrops?

There are several ways to be updated, one of the most effective of which is to join an active crypto community that works in this area. CoinSutra is one such crypto-community. We have already, in the above-mentioned links, explained how we help our community members to make full use of such opportunities. There are some more services and websites through which you can get regular updates about airdrops. However, understand the fact that not all airdrops are worth participating in and can be sometimes fraudulent too. Nevertheless, here are few of those services:

• Crypto Airdrops
• AirdropAlert.com

You can also find airdrop announcements on Twitter page and Bitcoin forum page of a particular project that you might be following.

How To Get Your Free Airdropped Crypto?

Claiming your airdropped free crypto coin/tokens can differ from project to project.

For example…

For the airdrop forked coins, you either need to be in control of your private keys or should know how to sign your public address with your private keys. That is we always suggest you to always store your cryptocurrencies in the following types of wallets where you are in control of your private keys:

• Ledger Nano S (Hardware Wallet)
• Trezor (Hardware Wallet)
• Exodus (Desktop Wallet)
• MyEtherWallet  (Web Wallet) etc..

Sometimes you just need to do the following things to get/claim your airdropped tokens/coins:

• Sign-up
• Retweet
• Refer a friend
• Join Telegram
• Or complete other social media tasks

Conclusion: Stay Updated & Stay Safe

With the popularity index of cryptocurrencies rising every day, the scams surrounding it are growing too. That is why if you find scams around cryptocurrency airdrops, don’t get surprised or fall for it. The only workaround to do away with them is educating yourself on the subject of airdrops, or as a matter of fact, on cryptocurrencies.

But I will tell you how scams around airdrops happen.

A scammy project with airdrop plans will ask you for your private keys to be entered at places and sometimes even fool you so that you enter your seed words in a malicious software. You will usually see such types of tactics in hacked slack channels, Telegram channels or tweaked Twitter accounts that will try to imposter the original account in some way.

Here is an example of a scammy twitter account and scammy airdrop tweet:

Are you ready for Guardian Masternodes? If not, we're running a limited airdrop of $WTC tokens to get you there.In the interest of your safety, I would suggest you do the due-diligence by going an extra mile while examining such airdrops.

Article Produced By

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

What Is AirDrop? How Does It Work?

AirDrop is a feature that lets Macs and iOS devices share files wirelessly with a minimum of fuss.

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

What Are ICO Air Drops and Where to Find Them

A recent phenomenon in the cryptocurrency economy

has been the incidences and instances of cryptocurrency token airdrops. This has been particularly pronounced with Initial Coin Offering (ICO) projects. Airdrop events have become such a ‘craze’ that people have turned up in their numbers on the internet seeking how to make some free tokens from airdrops.

What is an Air drop?

Air drop is just another way of distributing cryptocurrency tokens to help with the process of adoption for the particular token. Some ICO projects choose to give out their tokens practically for free to members of their community as a means of encouraging the token’s adoption and usage with the hope that in the process, there will be increased demand for the token which will in turn help to drive up its value. Usually after the main crowd sale events, a small percentage of the total tokens are set aside for air drops.

In as much as these air drops seem to be free, beneficiaries tend to be community members of the ICO project who have made efforts towards the development and growth of the community. Air drop beneficiary efforts are usually gauged by the consistency and quality of their contribution to topics that relate to the project. The duration of community membership is also a parameter often used – older members of an ICO project’s telegram, Slack, Discord or other communal social media platforms tend to be candidates for free tokens by way of airdrops as compared to newer community members.

Changes in the ICO Game

Just like the blockchain technology that runs it, ICOs keep changing by way of operations and execution. As the months go by, a lot of dynamism and improvements are introduced. A lot of these innovations in the ICO space are attributable to the Ethereum blockchain which is the leading blockchain by way of ICO token development. Majority of the token airdrop have been linked to ERC20 tokens. The flexibility and freedom that the Ethereum network gives entrepreneurs and developers has been a catalyst in the dynamism being experienced with the way ICOs are run and this same dynamism has inspired the recent airdrop events we are currently witnessing in the blockchain and ICO space.

Article Produced By
Emmanuel Darko

https://icowatchlist.com/blog/ico-air-drops-find/

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Everything You Need to Know About Airdrops, Hard Forks, & ICOs

Basic Returns vs. Premium Returns

Although investing in cryptocurrency looks complicated to the untrained eye, it is astoundingly simple.
Too simple, in fact.

Here’s a real life example.

One of my friends bought $1,000.00 of Ethereum (ETH) at the start of 2017. When he wanted to calculate his earnings for that year, he looked at how much prices had changed over the course of 12 months. A quick bit of arithmetic showed he had made $91,620 in profit. This is a jaw-dropping return by any standard, but here’s the kicker — he actually underestimated his own returns.

You see, cryptocurrencies have hidden properties — airdrops, hard forks, ICOs — that may boost their long-term value. Last September, Ethereum had an air drop that could have added upto $77,890 to my friend’s earnings. But his simple view of investing in cryptocurrency ignored these hidden riches.

Even so, my friend was lucky. Despite his ignorance about airdrops and hard forks, he still walked away with his pockets full. But imagine if the situation were slightly different. Imagine that Ethereum prices had stagnated rather than skyrocketed. Would my friend still have invested? Probably not. He would have thought it wasn’t worth his time, and as a consequence he would have lost out on a small fortune.

Why Does No One Talk About Airdrops?

Initial coin offerings and hard forks are well known. In 2017, there was a minor ICO craze after investors first discovered them, and hard forks slipped into the ether when Bitcoin Cash split from Bitcoin. Very few people understand them, of course, but at least you can articles about them in financial media. Airdrops, by contrast, are virtually unknown. Why?

That’s a hard question to answer.

One explanation is that cryptocurrencies are relatively young. Investors have not had enough time to study their eccentricities, nor have analysts had much time to communicate their technical aspects in normal language. Another is the business of news. Mainstream outlets are incentivized by Google and Facebook to publish clickbait rather than nerdy stories about airdrops. But it hardly matters. Regardless of why investors are ignorant of these subtleties, it’s important for them to understand these features. Can you imagine widespread ignorance about share buybacks or dividends? It’s inconceivable! With that in mind, let’s jump into the details.

What are airdrops, hard forks, and ICOs?

For the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with these terms, I’ve included a list of working definitions below. Underneath each definition is what I’d consider an equivalent event in the stock market. Hopefully, that will illuminate how these forces affect cryptocurrency returns.

AIRDROPS
Airdrops are essentially free handouts of cryptocurrency. They occur when a blockchain startup is looking to gin up attention their new token. When one public company buys another, investors can either receive a payout or equivalent shares of the buyer’s stock. Theoretically the merger is supposed to create extra value, thus increasing the value of the stock. Likewise, the idea that airdropped tokens have value rests on the assumption that you can sell them to willing buyers.

HARD FORKS
Hard forks occur when a blockchain splits in two. These forks often result in airdropped tokens, although it’s important to distinguish between the two terms. Why? Well, because hard forks suggest internal conflict among the blockchain’s developers. Two factions that cannot agree eventually lead to one group splintering off from the other, thus creating a second cryptocurrency.

This comparison is a bit of a stretch, but the Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash fork resulted in investors getting another $200.00 airdropped into their wallets. In a way, this is like a company deciding to return cash to shareholders. Sure, investors get a sudden infusion of new money, but it’s a bittersweet because it means that company is not investing in research, development, or acquisitions. It isn’t growing, in other words.

INITIAL COIN OFFERINGS

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) offer startups an alternative way to raise money. Rather than begging venture capitalists for table scraps or going public via an initial public offering, startups can simply issue their own cryptocurrency. This offers tremendous upside to the startup, since they forfeit no equity in the company. However, they need to ensure the token offers some value or else investors and regulators can take legal action.

In the first quarter of 2018, the music streaming service known as Spotify filed for a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange. This means that Spotify will circumvent the normal process going public, such as wooing institutional investors and paying investment bankers outrageous fees. It is a bold move that removes the middlemen of finance, much like an ICO.

Let’s Talk About Risks and Rewards

In terms of outcomes, the upside potential of airdrops, hard forks, and ICOs is well established.
Consider the following examples.

Stellar Lumens (XLM) airdrops 16 billion tokens.

If you had been holding Bitcoin on June 26, 2017, you were eligible to claim free money that Stellar Lumens would airdrop into your account. The good folks at Stellar say that “Bitcoin acted as a profound inspiration” when they were creating their cryptocurrency, and that’s why they want to share the love. Whatever their reason, the important takeaway is that XLM coins appreciated by more than 1,000% from then to the end of 2017. (Sidenote: Bitcoin holders could only claim the same percentage of the airdrop that they owned of the total Bitcoin supply. So, if they owned 0.002% of all Bitcoins in existence, they could only claim 0.002% of the air drop.)

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) forks off Bitcoin (BTC).

In August 2017, a group of dissident developers broke off from the Bitcoin community, splitting the blockchain in two. This hard fork resulted in every Bitcoin holder getting Bitcoin Cash tokens at a rate of 1-to-1. At the time, the price of one Bitcoin was $2,750. By comparison, BCH traded at approximately $200.00, although it would later skyrocket by more than 2,000%. Anyone holding Bitcoin at the time of the hard fork would have received this unexpected boon.

Golem (GNT) becomes a golden goose.

One of the earliest high-profile ICOs was held by Golem on November 10, 2016. This startup gives everyone access to immense processing power by connecting them to a network of computers around the world. The only catch is you pay for those resources by way of GNT tokens. What this does is effectively put the idle computing power of the world to good use. Investors thought this was a solid business plan, so they went long on GNT. Those that did would have made more than 3,000% returns by the time this article went to press.

So what are the risks?

One,
regulators will decide these are financial products which need to be overseen and taxed.
Two,
someone is scamming you.

Both risks are pretty serious.

China and South Korea have banned ICOs already, proving that regulators are capable of coming down hard on the industry. The European Union, meanwhile, demands that ICOs meet anti-money laundering and anti-fraud compliance regulations. Canada deems them securities. The U.S. is similarly tough, and many other places have not yet established rules, but are in the process of doing so. With all this regulation coming down the pipeline, it’s easy to forget why regulators are worried. Namely, that cryptocurrency scams are dime a dozen.

From pump and dump scams to price manipulation, the industry is overpopulated by bad-faith actors looking to take prey on retail investors. So even while the upcoming regulation is burdensome, it is necessary for the industry to succeed.

Verdict: Big Cryptos Are Often The Best

Some readers might rush off to invest in small, unknown ICOs after reading this report. That would mean I failed to communicate the dangers of ICOs or that they did not grasp the significance of airdrops. The same goes for hard forks. Building an investment strategy around these features is a high risk, high reward approach. But airdrops, on the other hand, are a relatively risk-free way to line your pockets. That said, the million dollar question remains: Which cryptocurrencies are best for airdrops? My advice is to go Big. Airdrops benefit larger cryptos, such as Ethereum and Bitcoin. Not the no-name cryptos with $100,000 in market cap. Here’s why.

The purpose of an airdrop is to gain attention by leveraging the liquidity of a popular cryptocurrency. OmiseGO and did not search through the bargain bin for its airdrop destination — it chose Ethereum, in the same way that Stellar Lumens chose Bitcoin. I want you to remember this, because cryptocurrencies are built on shifting sands. Some of the crypto — most of them in fact — might not be around in a few years. The ones that will, however, could be worth a fortune.

Article Produced By

G. S. Iyer
Senior Tech Editor @ Lombardi Publishing. Columnist @ Profit Confidential.

https://medium.com/@iyer_gs/airdrops-hardforks-icos-63e1efaf16a7

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

What Is EON? Why Is It So Popular Among EOS Investors?

With EOS mainnet launch, airdrops to EOS users are increasing rapidly.

Among these airdrops, EON is the most valuable one. Many EOS investors refer to it as “the most expensive crypto candy in history”.

This article will discuss what is EON and why it is so popular.

The most revolutionary technology:
up to 100,000 TPS solving the biggest problem of EOS

According to its website (https://eon.org/), EON is an intelligent high-speed blockchain operating system. By intelligently allocating the entire network computing power to synchronize the node load with the cloud network in real time, it can make the average TPS of the entire network reach more than 100,000. All network requests can also be completed almost simultaneously. This fundamentally solves the problem of a mere 4000 TPS caused by numerous network requests generated in a single EOS transaction.

TPS (transaction per second) is the number of transactions system processes per second. It is the core performance of a public chain and the basis for determining other functions and visions of the public chain. EON’s realization of 100,000 TPS undoubtedly addresses the biggest pain point. As the number of global nodes increases in the future, EON's TPS will eventually reach more than 1 million.

Currently many blockchain projects are in the conceptual phase and haven’t been commercially implemented. As the world's leading blockchain project, EON has begun to be put into practice. On the basis of EOS, EON integrates distributed computing with traditional technologies such as network storage, virtualization, load balancing, and hot standby redundancy to upgrade the existing EOS network. It not only inherits the advantages of EOS, but also achieves an evolution of EOS ecology. EON is the next-generation high-speed blockchain system that has fundamentally solved the biggest pain point of EOS.

The latest development: EON Editor

With the world's leading R&D team, EON is committed to changing the current blockchain value ecology and redefining the blockchain value standard from its inception. On 2nd June, EON launched the world’s first cloud-based smart contract editor EON Editor (editor.eon.org), which is eagerly anticipated by the global blockchain enthusiasts.

EON Editor provides developers with a more secure and reliable development environment by integrating development environment in the cloud. Cloud-based development environment means that developers can connect to the network from anywhere to complete projects, easily define resources, debug, and quickly share the development environment. Developers only need a computer connected to Internet to access the web browser instead of installing files or configuring development computers. They can use EON Editor to easily complete the development, debugging, and compiling of smart contracts in the cloud.

Roughly speaking, EON Editor has four core advantages: First, developers do not need to configure the development environment, but can complete smart contract development on the browser. Second, real-time collaborative writing code and shared development environment achieves telecommuting. Third, it lowers the threshold for the development of smart contracts so that new projects can be quickly built. Fourth, developers can easily implement DApps based on EON super ecology.

The launch of EON Editor will greatly increase the efficiency of developers, fundamentally promote the development of the entire blockchain industry, and redefine the standard of blockchain value. Blockchain technology has many advantages, but novice users face many difficulties to develop their own blockchain products. This has been changed by EON Editor. It is the realization of the genius design of EON project "EON=EOS+NETWORK" and will definitely redefine the blockchain development standard.

Strong team

EON announced its partnership with the world’s top blockchain information security team on 5th June. They are committed to enhancing the overall safety, privacy, and usability of the blockchain ecosystem by publishing industry trend reports, real-time monitoring of ecological security risks, responsible exposure of vulnerabilities, and providing relevant security solutions and services to help communities defend against emerging security threats.

Another team working with the EON project is Armors Labs. As the world's top blockchain security laboratory, Armors aims to focus on the blockchain security cloud ecosystem. Their team members mainly come from Apple, Google and other world's top Internet companies. At the beginning of this month, EON team revealed that they had received investment from INBlockchain Capital founded by Li Xiaolai, Consensus Labs，CollinStar, Horman Capital, as well as OldDriver and Zenix from South Korea. These investors are influential in blockchain industry and have already invested in a large number of popular projects.

The potential of EON

We all know that as one of the most famous blockchain projects, EOS has far more investors than others. EON can directly reach EOS users by its airdrop to them. Increasing the liquidity of EON and getting listed on exchanges has always been a concern for the project team. EON has already been listed on Coinoah and Coinw, where its prices have been steadily rising as of press time. Its price hit a peak of $1.56, which fully demonstrates the wide recognition of EON’s value. At the same time, EON is promised to list on more global mainstream cryptocurrency exchanges in 2018. To sum up, driven by the strength of capital and its increasing influence, EON's price is reasonable to rise by three to five times in 2018. If listed on large exchanges, it is very likely to jump sharply.

Of course, the price may be affected by positive news in the short term. However, in the long run, it must reflect the practical value of the project. Now it is the moment when EON siphons other public chains, and its price is ushering in a solid support. As the next generation of blockchains, EON is very likely to lead the development of global public chains in 2018 and create a new era. The future of EON is coming. You might have missed buying pizza with BTC, ETH's crowdfunding or the early EOS… But don't miss out on EON!

Article Produced By
EON.INC

http://eon.org/
pr@eon.org
https://cointelegraph.com/press-releases/what-is-eon-why-is-it-so-popular-among-eos-investors

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

Upcoming EOS Airdrops in June

June is proving to be a busy month for EOS.

First came their much anticipated mainnet launch and the 20% market growth which accompanied it. Then the mainnet launch stalled, and this was accompanied by the sudden global market dip of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’; which saw EOS lose 30% of its value. The mainnet launch attracted a lot of attention over the course of the last month, with much of it being positive. But now the headlines have soured, and questions are being raised about the team’s ability to clean up the hundreds of bugs still plaguing the platform; as well as the failure to reach a consensus among the platform’s block producers.

Regardless of the furore of the last couple of weeks, EOS remains a much hyped blockchain operating system, and it has a host of projects looking to launch themselves to success by starting on the EOS launchpad. EOS is host to 18 projects who have announced airdrops for the month of June alone. Some of these have already passed, while some have gone relatively unnoticed. But there’s still plenty to come, so let’s take a look at some of the tokens are going to be airdropping to EOS holders before the month is out.

Lab Ledger (LAB)

Lab Ledger aims to corner a very specific market – the scientific journal industry. According to Lab Ledger’s problem-statement, they are seeking to redress the imbalances of the peer-review journal industry, which have seen subscription prices rise 251% in under twenty years. At the same time, leading scientific journals have become unbelievably money-makers, and can afford to charge what are unreachable prices for many scientific researchers. This oligopoly which has emerged threatens to shut out serious scientific voices, simply because they can’t stump up the bribe required to have their research seen.

At least this is the picture painted by Ledger Labs, who aim to circumvent the ridiculous pricing of journal industry by moving the process over to the blockchain – in this case, the EOS blockchain. While the idea may seem incredibly niche, this is one of the few attempts to transfer an industry onto the blockchain that actually seems to have some merit. The main obstacle for Lab Ledger will be adoption. How many scientists will publish their papers on a platform which no one knows exists? But that’s the same problem which faces many blockchain services, so Lab Ledger isn’t alone on that front.

LAB airdrop date: June 21st

Atidium (ATD)

Atidium are airdropping 900,000,000 ATD tokens on a 1:1 ratio for EOS holders.This amounts to 60% of their total token allocation, with the rest being split among the team and the marketing department. Atidium aims to provide a cryptocurrency that will help users keep track of their finances, and includes a few unique features to help with general financial management.

One example is the proposed ability to ‘color’ coins – that is, to mark them as being for a very specific use. At the same time, Atidium proposes a shared wallet system, where you could allocate your son a token amount which could only be spent in a certain place. The Atidium roadmap is still a long way from completion, and their level of ambition would require untold amounts of work; both technical and social. For Atidium’s application to be worth anything, it would need to secure adoption by hundreds, if not thousands of real world vendors. It’s not impossible, but certainly ambitious.

ATD airdrop date: June 28th

HorusPay (HORUS)

HorusPay is an upcoming EOS project which aims to provide a platform for payroll services. According to HorusPay’s website, typical payroll vendors charge up to 40% for their services, and HorusPay wants to cut out the middle-man and provide an automated system for the management of payrolls.

Users would presumably benefit from the core blockchain values of security and decentralization, and while the transfer of financial services to the blockchain is a viable idea, there are also many crypto projects looking to invade this space.

Blockchain platforms which focus on purely financial services tend to miss out on much of the typical cryptocurrency hype. The average crypto investor can’t tell the difference between the hundreds of ‘decentralized payment and remittance platforms’ which pop up every year. For HorusPay to make an impact, one would think they’d have to either show up with some kick-ass technology in tow, or ramp up the hype train with some partnerships or similarly promising announcements.

HORUS airdrop date: June 30th

Prospectors (PGL)

Prospectors is what’s known as a Massive Multiplayer Online Real Time Economic Strategy (MMORTES) – a game which focuses resource management and economic strategy. The gameworld models the economic situation of the late 19th / early 20th century, and players must compete in the process of mining for gold.

The game has been alpha-tested for a while now and the team recently announced the transition to beta-testing towards the end of May. Gameplay videos can be found on YouTube, and Prospectors seems like it may have the potential to do well, even among the currently saturated blockchain-gaming ICO market. By all accounts, Prospectors appears to have more going for it than the many CryptoKitties knock-offs that appear on a daily basis. While the game does involve buying assets and selling them on (the entirety of CryptoKitties), it also involves the extra layers of strategy afforded by the requirement that you actually set up a prospecting business.

This means that before you get to the gold mines, you’ll need to get your tools, resources and team all in order. PGL tokens represent said gold and fuel the in-game economy. The marketing materials for the game claim that it operates on free-market principles; with in-game prices being reflective of the supply and demand of its user base. If previous blockchain games are anything to go by, this probably means that game items will be priced exorbitantly upon launch, when there are too few players to make up the economy. However this is speculation, and Prospectors could yet prove to be the blockchain game that bucks the trend.

PGL airdrop date: 30th June

And a few more…

Many EOS airdrops are scheduled for the month of June, but some of them have undefined dates. CETOS, for example, is a blockchain project which aims to become a facilitator for day-to-day healthcare services. They’ve set an airdrop date of ‘June/July’. EOS Cafe aims to airdrop its BEANS tokens to users some time around June, but no clear date has been set. EOS Cafe has the long term goal of setting up EOS-focused coffee-shops and hack-spaces.

Another undefined airdrop date in June belongs to EOX – a proposed global crypto commerce platform where everything can be bought with cryptocurrency. While the ONO Social Network rounds off those airdrops listed for unspecified dates in June, and will release their tokens in a 1:1 ratio against EOS tokens.

Going, Going… Gone!

Many tokens have already dropped this month, with projects such as Tokena, Evolution, EOS Sports Bets, EOS Classic, and EON releasing tokens to registered EOS holders. Several are launching right now, or are due to launch in the next few hours, such as Chaince, Everpedia, KEOS and Scatter.

Article Produced By
Greg Thomson

4.5 stars on average, based on 9 rated posts Greg Thomson is a full-time crypto writer and digital nomad. He eats ICOs for breakfast and bleeds altcoins. Wherever he lays his public key is his home.

https://hacked.com/upcoming-eos-airdrops-in-june/

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden

ICO Marketing and airdrops

Before going in details about ICO Marketing, let’s understand what is an ICO?

ICO:
ICO stands for Initial Coin Offering is a way for startups to crowdfund capital via selling their own token in exchange of either Bitcoin or Ethereum. In other words, ICO is primarily a fundraising process for startsups to build cryptocurrency businesses.

ICO Marketing:
ICO Marketing is a strategy used by blockchain startups to create awareness about the new token/coin to the people by using different advertising methods.

Airdrops:
Airdrops is a process of distributing tokens or coins to the current cryptocurrency holders for free.

How marketing is getting is more difficult for ICO?

In the last one year, there are lots of unusual things happened in the cryptocurrency market. Some of the most popular social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have banned the Cryptocurrency ads. Apart from this, search engine giant, Google has also banned the Cryptocurrency ads.

A lot of blockchain startups were using social media platforms in order to gain customers. However, as they are banning ads, now ICO marketing is getting difficult. Hence, these ICO’s need a new way of marketing. Apart from this, there are lots of regulations are being placed on the ICO in various countries worldwide. Also, some of the countries have also banned the Cryptocurrency completely.

ICO’s need a new way of marketing

There are still different ways to do ICO Marketing. Here is the list:

1. Reddit: Build an amazing community on Reddit and engage with the users regularly. As soon as you win the trust of users, it will lead to ICO successes.
2. Facebook Groups: Even if Facebook has banned the ICO advertising, there are plenty of Groups which are built for people having interest in cryptocurrency, ICO and Blockchain. Hence, you can build a strong community here also.
3. Twitter: It is one of the fastest growing social media platform and large number of people are using it for advertising. Even if, advertisement are banned, you can still, create an appropriate page on Twitter and post regular updates about the ICO.
4. Telegram: Another popular social media platform and used by various communities for marketing. On Telegram you can create your own channel and post regular updates about the ICO.
5. Specialized Forums: Some of the well-known forums are being read by crypto enthusiast regularly. Hence you can list your ICO on various popular forms and gain audience.
6. Linkedin Groups: There are large number of LinkedIn Groups on Cryptocurrency. Hence, you can provide details about your ICO on all of these groups.
7. Quora Discussions: Quora is one of the most effective channel for covering ICO. You can post details on special threads meant for ICO.
8. Email Marketing: You can also send details about the ICO to all of your potential customers via Email Marketing.
9. SEO Strategy: Build a proper website by considering On-Page and Off-Page SEO Factors. Later, do proper SEO and get listed on various search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
10. Airdrops: You can also provide free tokens/ coins to the people in the beginning. This is one of the best way to get audience.
    Hence, you can follow all the above mentioned tactics to do appropriate ICO Marketing. By following all the tactics, you will lead your ICO for success.

11. Bounties: With bounties crypto enthusiast can complete task to earn tokens. Similar to the “Wild West bounty hunter”, where a person had to catch a criminal to earn a bounty. Nowadays in crypto, people complete a job to earn tokens.

Trusted sources for Airdrops & Bounties are:

• AirdropAlert
• AirdropAlert Twitter
• AirdropAlert TelegramBountiesAlert
• Cryptocoin.news

  Article Produced By

Front Page » Business » ICO Marketing and airdrops
augustafreepress2@gmail.com

https://augustafreepress.com/ico-marketing-and-airdrops/

David https://markethive.com/david-ogden