Stellar airdrops tend to fall short of their objectives, research shows

Airdrops launched by Stellar Lumens developers in partnership with various services either fail to draw the interest of the community, or lead to immediate disposal of free tokens on exchanges, according to the recent report published by CoinMetrics

Thus, the airdrop announced by a messaging app Keybase.io on September 9 was supposed to become the largest and the longest in Stellar’s history. The team planned to distribute 2 billion XLM tokens (roughly 2% of the total XLM supply) over 20 months. The CoinMetrics researchers found out that by now, Keybase users that qualify for airdrop claimed 19 million XLM out of 100 million tokens distributed so far;  one million tokens were sold for fiat.

"Our analysis shows that despite it being literally free money, only a minority of the targeted population actually claim their airdrop money (1.2M addresses out of 30-40M wallets for Blockchain.com, around 20% of Keybase users)” the report says.

The researches explained that few people prefer to keep an asset they receive for free, which casts some doubts on the efficiency of such campaigns. 

Most people decide to exchange this new money for another one (either fiat, a stablecoin or Bitcoin) and only a few of them keep using the cryptoasset by getting more of it on open markets or through other means. These findings call into question the efficacy of airdrops, as most of the coins are sold immediately.”

XLM/USD is changing hands at $0.0578. The coin has gained over 8% of its value in recent 24 hours amid the recovery from Wednesday’s low at $0.0524. Stellar is the 10th largest digital asset with the current market value of $1.16 billion.