May 21
The Biggest Airdrop Opportunities on Solana
There have already been several airdrops on Solana in 2024, some of them lucrative and others not so. Still, even knowing that not all airdrops will be as profitable as Jito, farming some of these airdrops can create huge opportunities.
Sanctum
Unlike Ethereum, Solana doesn’t seem a popular blockchain for liquid staking protocols. Only a small part – around 5% - of the staked SOL is liquid. While staking enhances the blockchain’s security and earns stakers yield, users cannot employ their locked assets in DeFi activities, such as lending or borrowing against their tokens.
Enter Sanctum. Originally known as Socean, Sanctum is a liquid staking protocol built specifically for the Solana blockchain. Since its token $INF itself is a liquid staking token, it can be used in other Solana ecosystem protocols, e.g., Meteora. Meteora, a liquidity hub on Solana, doesn’t have a token yet either. So, purchasing INF and providing liquidity to INF-SOL pool on Meteora kills two birds with one stone: you are poised to receive airdrop from both protocols.
Though any claim on airdrops is speculative, there are rumors that Sanctum airdrop will be as lucrative as Jito, where users made 5-figure sums for depositing only 1 SOL. In April 2024 the procotol closed another funding round, bringing the funds raised to $6.1M.
Meteora
Formerly known as Mercurial, the protocol rebranded itself to Meteora in December 2022 to get rid of negative effects of FTX collapse which dragged Solana ecosystem down with itself.
Meteora aims to make Solana “the ultimate trading hub” for crypto users. Solana is known for its speed, low fees and scalability. Since it doesn’t have any (significant) L2 yet, its liquidity is not fragmented which means all this liquidity has been concentrated on L1. The only problem is that the overall liquidity is lower than its closest competitor, Ethereum. This is what Meteora strives to address – to bring significant liquidity to Solana which will lead to its mass adoption and sustained growth.
Meteora offers 4 different types of products currently:
- Meteora vaults
- Dynamic AMM pools
- Multi-token Stable Pool
- LST pools
It has been confirmed that Meteora will do an airdrop for its $MET token. What can you do to become eligible for this airdrop? I'm assuming that any interaction will suffice. If you have USDC or USDT sitting idly in your balance, consider providing liquidity to stablecoin pools. If you are into LSTs, you can add liquidity to Meteora LST pools.
Parcl (Season 2)
Parcl is a real estate trading platform which made it easy for retail traders to long or short entire cities or even the whole US property market. The first $PRCL airdrop was concluded on the 16th April. While the date of the second airdrop has not been specified, Season 2 is expected to conclude at the end of the second quarter.
You can get points for providing liquidity or opening long or short positions. At the time of writing, every dollar (in fact, USDC) deposited into the liquidity pool earns 8 points, while if you pay $1 in trading fees, you’ll get a thousand points. This is different from Season 1 where users received points just for open interest. Which is understandable from the protocol’s perspective – the idea is to encourage active trading which generated more fees for the protocol than just opening a long or short position and “sitting” on high open interest.
There are other ways to earn points other than LP or trading. If you successfully liquidate another trader’s position, you’ll get 50,000 points. One can also earn points by referring a friend or closing a trading position in loss.
Rain.fi
Let’s say, you want to buy BONK but you don’t have enough USDC or SOL. Fortunately, there is a solution, it’s called Rain.fi. According to its website, “Rain.fi is a decentralized lending and borrowing protocol on Solana that offers a unique buy-now-pay-later system” for tokens and NFTs.
The image below makes it clear how BNPL (buy-now-pay-later), also called Magic Swap works. You want to buy 14 M $BONK which at the current price is worth about 350 USDC. But you have only 0.25 SOL in your wallet which is obviously not enough. Thanks to Rain.fi, you can purchase 14 M $BONK with only 0.25 SOL! You pay your 0.25 SOL, borrow from the protocol the rest of the required amount and buy the desired quantity of BONK. In 1 day you have to return the borrowed amount, 2.33 SOL to get 14,2 M BONK back.
Probably you think, “So what? This is just leverage trading”. You are right, it’s. But what makes Magic Swap attractive is that there is NO risk of liquidation. Unlike other forms of leverage trading, such as perpetuals or borrowing against your assets, you cannot lose your tokens via Magic Swap. If you fail to pay 2.33 SOL in 1 day, you won’t get BONK and you’ll keep 0.25 SOL.
Rain introduced a points system where users earn “droplets” for locking, lending or borrowing tokens. I believe it is one of the most underfarmed protocols out there and by lending a relatively small amount, say, 1,000 USDC, one can go pretty high in the leaderboard.
Disclaimer: Nothing on this site should be construed as a financial investment recommendation. It’s important to understand that investing is a high-risk activity. Investments expose money to potential loss.
