How airdrop eligibility and snapshots work
Almost every airdrop dispute comes down to one thing: the snapshot. A snapshot is a copy of on-chain state at a specific moment, and if your activity happened after it, that activity doesn't count. Understanding snapshots, eligibility criteria, and sybil filtering explains most of why allocations land the way they do.
Snapshots happen before you hear about them
For retroactive drops, teams pick a snapshot date in the past specifically so that nobody can farm it after the announcement. Jupiter's first Jupuary counted swaps made before November 2023, announced later. When a drop is announced with a future snapshot, the criteria are usually already fixed and only holding-based actions still count.
The criteria projects actually use
Teams generally measure a few things: how much you transacted, how often, over how long, and whether you did anything beyond the minimum. Jito required at least 100 points earned from staking activity over roughly ten months. deBridge required using the bridge on ten or more different days. Zeta gated phase one on a trading score. Volume alone is rarely enough; recurring activity across weeks or months is what most criteria reward.
Sybil filters remove farm wallets
A sybil is one person pretending to be many by running hundreds of wallets. Teams now filter these aggressively before distribution: wallets funded from the same source, acting in the same block patterns, or moving funds in circles get clustered and cut. LayerZero went as far as offering self-reporting before its 2024 drop. If you split activity across many small wallets, you're more likely to lose all of them than to multiply your allocation.
Checking where you stand
Once a drop is announced, eligibility is knowable: the criteria are published and the snapshot is fixed. Paste your address into Airdropped.link to check it against every drop in our directory, including ones you may have forgotten you qualified for.
