Does your Cosmos wallet qualify for airdrops? A brief explanation on wallets, wallet providers and airdrops.

A misconception I’m seeing is that if you’re staking on Exodus, Trust wallet, Cosmostation or Defi Wallet, you won’t receive airdrops. That is not true. The wallet provider doesn’t matter with regard to airdrops, what matters is, whether you’re staking natively on-chain. Do you hold the private key/seed phrase to the wallet and pick the validator? If yes, then you are staking natively and are potentially eligible for airdrops. What also matters as well, is who you delegate your stake too. A few recommendations are:

• Don’t delegate to a centralized exchange validator

• Don’t delegate to a 0% commission validator

• Don’t delegate in the top 10 of validators by voting power

If you have been staking natively and doing these items I have recommended, you may have plenty of airdrops that your wallet address had been included in.

Then why do I need Keplr for airdrops?

Most projects in Cosmos use Keplr wallet to connect to their app and that is why you need Keplr to claim the airdrops. The reason being, it’s widely adopted among Cosmos users, and the developers don’t have time to include a claiming function for every wallet provider. So they tend to just use Keplr in their initial launch and airdrop phase, making it the only wallet that can usually be used to claim airdrops.

The good news is, it’s extremely easy to port your wallet into into Keplr, all you do is get the Keplr browser extension on your laptop/PC, go to “import existing wallet”, and input your seed phrase/private key.

After you have imported your wallet into Keplr, go to r/cosmosairdrops and look around for airdrops you may have qualified for.