Airdrop fatigue, VC fatigue, yap fatigue. It’s all so tiresome. Thankfully, in the modern age, there’s another way. A way that aligns incentives and doesn’t turn project communities into a gm wasteland for mercenaries. Fair launches patch bugs in the handful of paths a project has for token distribution and fundraising. And they might just make CT bearable again.
Airdrop fatigue
The long-established playbook: raise from VCs and allocate a slice of tokens for an airdrop. Teams get a big chunk of money upfront, and raise announcements fuel speculation from a community forming around the vague promise of free money.
Airdrops used to be a way to give genuine community members a stake -- earned through legitimate contribution, whether that's protocol usage, bug hunting, or governance discussion.
The mechanization of airdrop hunting has led to incentivization of the lowest effort activity. Robotic replies to project accounts border on spam. Discord servers need dedicated #gm channels to keep discussion channels clean. Huge volumes of testnet activity can be generated for free by a single user with thousands of wallets. Not only does this crowd out legitimate users, it rewards people for gaming the system.
(Source)
The success of airdrops like $UNI, $ENS, and $OP set expectations from users that they can get tens of thousands of dollars for being in the right place at the right time. If you look at the history of the biggest airdrops of all time, however, you'll notice:
- The majority occurred between 2020 and 2022. At least 3 years ago. The meta has been on the decline for over one full cycle.
- Airdrops on the more recent end of the spectrum had increasingly murkier eligibility criteria ("maintain consistent activity over time"). This is what fuels farmers to imagine that things like saying gm in Discord and spamming X replies will pay off.
Yap fatigue
Social engagement campaigns like Kaito use a "proof-of-attention" model, rewarding users based on the volume, engagement, and relevance of their contributions.
Typically this looks like:
Platforms like Kaito aim to incentivize genuine participation through leaderboards and metrics for content quality.
In practice, campaigns generate artificial social signals. And in the same fashion as an airdrop, once the token launches and the campaign ends, there’s nothing left for the community to hold onto.
Saturation leads to decline. The short-term speculation meta is overbought, and another meta is rising.
VC fatigue
For most venture-backed projects, the trajectory is pre-determined. Hype cycles push VC money into specific narratives, an incentivized testnet goes live, airdrops are foretold, CEX listings rumoured. And, often, distribution is an afterthought.
Venture capital funding can misalign incentives and centralize power. As exciting as VC funding announcements can be for a community, they can also be a signal that insiders have the edge over the common user. In the age of hyperfinancialization, bad choices at the cap table level can kill even the best tech.
This is why Decent Land Labs’ token – the Load Network token ($LOAD) – launched 60% of its supply to the community. Founded in 2021, we sold 20% of supply over the years to fund core protocol development before fair launches existed, but will still have broader, fairer distribution than most VC-backed projects or even those who did an airdrop or public sale.
In this new era, fair launches disrupt the VC dynamic with self-sustaining funding model based on real-world use and continuous contribution:
- Teams can generate revenue immediately upon launching their project, maintaining operational independence.
- Continuous earnings replace speculative upfront capital injections, encouraging teams to keep building
- Projects like AO, Morpheus, and Load Network show that new ecosystems can emerge by aligning their revenue directly with actual usage rather than speculative investments.
(Source)
The fair launch option
Fair launches are an alternative not just to airdrops, but VC funding.
The idea is simple. It asks no upfront payment from participants, has clear criteria for rewards, and guarantees allocation.
Users deposit yield-bearing assets into a smart contract, delegating the yield towards a fair launch project in return for the project's native token. At any time, a user can withdraw their full principle and keep the fair launch rewards. Examples of this include Morpheus, AO, and Load Network.
A fair launch is a token distribution method that shares characteristics with public sales and airdrops, while patching their limitations.
Like both public sales and airdrops, fair launches power wide token distribution from the very beginning. Fair launches differ from public sales in that they don't require participants to make any upfront purchase or investment. They also improve upon traditional airdrops: transparent rules for distribution, not opaque criteria.
The mechanics and outcomes of fair launches are a shift away from speculative, opaque token distributions toward incentive-aligned community growth. Unlike VC-dependent projects, fair launches offer an economically rational method for bootstrapping development and rewarding meaningful community participation.
Fair launches also protect investors from over-allocating to a project that isn’t destined to live long. Gradually investing based on traction means projects are incentivized to keep shipping and keep their promises. It’s almost like milestone-based funding rather than blind trust.
In the airdrop distribution model, you trade your token for hype. The goal is distribution, the outcome is temporary free money hype. Or perhaps that’s the goal too. In the fair launch model, you get a long-term funding source and bootstrap a community via gradual ownership. Token rewards accrue over time based on stake rather than dropping in one go– and the fairness is mathematically ensured.