Disclaimer: I mention some coins here, it is not to advertise them. I own some of them. This is for informational purpose only and this should be an open discussion for constructive talking.

It started in late 2023 when people staked just 1 SOL on Jito and received around ~$15k in JITO tokens. Similar happend with PYTH where people got very big airdrops.

Then there was the big Celestia TIA airdrop for stakers of Cosmos Hub.

This got many people excited and greedy to receive more airdrops and the projects are actively luring people into buying or interacting with their protocols in order to be eligible for airdrops:

1) "Points farming":

DeFi projects displaying "points" for doing tasks like lending/borrowing/long-/shorting/swapping. All of this is being game-i-fied by using flashy numbers going up, multipliers for doing special tasks.

2) Staking airdropped coins/tokens for even more airdrops:

There are dozens of projects which are said to airdrop tokens to people who stake TIA (a coin which was airdropped). Rumors also say that staking PYTH will make one eligible for other airdrops. Injective INJ stakers will get airdrops, too. Many other coins like e.g. MANTA say that staking them will eventually make you eligible for airdops.

3) Owning NFTs for airdrops: Simply own certain NFTs to get "whitelists", coins/token or even more NFTs airdropped

4) Bridging coins to a L2 to receive airdrops

5) Having a history of several transactions on certain chains/bridges/ having made swaps on wallets like Phantom/Metamask...

Projects want to reward its users with their own token when these projects decide to launch one.

But there are also disadvantages of airdrops:

1) People blindly ape into coins, staking them in hope to be eligible for an airdrop:

- they lock themselves by staking the coins, it usually takes days to unstake these coins. In case the price tanks and one wants to sell their coins, they need to wait until the unbonding is finished

- the criteria for the airdrops are secret. Projects usually did a snapshot BEFORE they actually announce the airdrop. People may have not stake enough coins to be eligible

2) A lot of scams are floating around:

- unwary people click on scam links to claim fake coins

- scam projects release useless tokens, but which requires people to invest a certain amount of money

3) overdilution of participants in the airdrop:

- even if the project is legit, if too many people are eligible for an airdrop, the actual airdrop will be so small

- some projects incentivizes people to participate in testnets. If too many peope participate + bots farming these testnets, the airdrop will be very small and disappointing

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