$85B in Free Money: How Airdrops Changed the Way We View Crypto

Top 50 Airdrops by ATH Value

The Airdrop Value ATH metric reflects the theoretical maximum value of distributed tokens: the total airdropped tokens volume multiplied by their all-time high price. It allows us to estimate the scale each airdrop could have reached at the peak of market interest, but does not show the amount that participants were actually able to secure.

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The combined peak value of the top 50 airdrops is approximately $85B. However, the distribution is extremely uneven: Hyperliquid accounts nearly 28% of the total, the five largest airdrops account for 47%, and the TOP-10 account for 61% of the total peak value. The median value within the top 50 is approximately $859M.

The year 2024 stands out in particular: projects from this period account for approximately $49.6B, or 58% of the ranking’s total value. Hyperliquid alone accounted for nearly half of the total value for 2024.

Top 10 Airdrops by Current Value

The peak valuation indicates the maximum market potential, but the current value answers a more practical question: how much the distributed supply of tokens would be worth today. Based on this metric, the ranking becomes even more concentrated.

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The combined current value of these ten distributions is approximately $19.45B, with Hyperliquid’s airdrop accounting for 86.7% of that amount. The top five entries alone represent approximately 96.0% of the ranking. In other words, without HYPE, the current value of even the largest airdrops would be measured not in tens of billions, but in hundreds of millions of dollars.

The difference between the all-time high (ATH) and current value also shows how rarely projects manage to maintain their peak valuation. HYPE retains approximately 71.0% of its peak value, while LIT retains around 58.4%. By comparison, UNI has retained approximately 8.6%, BONK 5.1%, ENA 5.5%, and PENGU about 4.0%.

Taken together, the current value of these ten airdrops is approximately 42.9% of their combined peak valuation. However, excluding Hyperliquid, that figure drops to just 11.9%. This leads to a more meaningful conclusion: the exceptional performance of a single project masks the fact that most major airdrops have lost the bulk of their peak value over time.

The Largest Airdrop of Each Year 

Annual trends allow us to track how key market narratives have evolved. At various times, the largest shares of the market have been accounted for by DEXs, perpetual trading platforms, NFTs, L2 networks, and new blockchain ecosystems.

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This sequence does not show steady growth in airdrop sizes. Instead, it reflects changing market cycles. Uniswap became one of the key symbols of the “DeFi Summer” of 2020. The launch of Uniswap v2 cemented the automated market maker model as the foundational infrastructure for on-chain trading.

As DeFi matured, the market’s focus began to shift from simple token swaps to more complex financial instruments, and dYdX epitomized this transition by enabling the scaling of non-custodial trading in perpetual futures and bringing on-chain derivatives closer to centralized exchanges in terms of speed and convenience.

The next major market narrative was the NFT, the peak of which was most vividly captured by ApeCoin. However, the growth in the number of users and applications simultaneously heightened Ethereum’s need for cheaper and more efficient infrastructure, bringing Arbitrum to the forefront. 

The most recent stage was Hyperliquid, which reflected a shift from general-purpose blockchains to high-performance networks whose architecture is designed from the ground up for specific financial tasks.

At this stage, it remains unclear which project will emerge as the defining token launch of 2026. In the meantime, you can track confirmed and potential airdrops, upcoming rewards, and active campaigns through the “Drop Hunting” section on our website.