The company behind the Christmas Day airdrop is called OpenDAO. Anyone who bought or sold on OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace, could claim OpenDAO’s $SOS tokens. As of Jan. 12, some 300,000 wallets have claimed the airdrop. (Unusually for an airdrop, OpenDAO isn’t officially associated with OpenSea. The purpose of OpenDAO is to support traders in ways that OpenSea doesn’t — but that’s a whole other story.)
The more money people had spent on OpenSea, the bigger the airdrop they were eligible to receive. Anyone who claimed the airdrop would see a Spotify Wrapped-style infographic detailing their NFT trading data from 2021. Soul had spent $25,000 on NFTs via OpenSea, which put him in the top 6%.
The airdrops received by the top 1% border on the obscene. Crypto whales published their infographic on Twitter, boasting of airdrops worth tens of thousands of dollars. Several traders had bought so many NFTs, and spent so much on ethereum’s notoriously expensive transaction fees, that they were able to claim $140,000 worth of $SOS.
OpenDAO became the hot new token, with $650 million worth of $SOS being traded on Dec. 26. It now has a market cap of $312 million, has been listed on several major exchanges and is among the biggest DAOs on the market. (DAOs are decentralized autonomous organizations, which work by issuing tokens that double as voting rights – token owners then vote on how the DAO’s treasury is spent.)
If there’s one thing that can be counted on in cryptocurrency, it’s that success is immediately imitated by others. OpenDAO garnered a huge amount of attention, and the airdrops have been flowing ever since.