Retroactive airdrop

A retroactive airdrop rewards wallets for activity they completed before the airdrop was announced, so recipients qualify through past use of a protocol rather than tasks set afterwards. The best-known case is Uniswap's UNI launch, announced on 16 September 2020 against a snapshot that had ended on 1 September. Each address that had ever called the Uniswap v1 or v2 contracts could claim 400 UNI, including about 12,000 addresses that had only ever submitted failed transactions, and 49,192 past liquidity providers shared about 49 million UNI. Arbitrum's 2023 airdrop also looked backwards: it was designed to reward early adopters and counted points earned before the Nitro upgrade of 31 August 2022 at double value.

For an airdrop hunter, the qualifying work is already done, or missed, by the time a retroactive drop is known. Nothing needs paying to unlock it: the FTC says only scammers demand payment in cryptocurrency, and ethereum.org says no legitimate service will ever ask for your recovery phrase. A reward whose rules are published before the activity is a points program or quest rather than a retroactive airdrop. See airdrop eligibility.