The top token handouts of the year netted users over $4.5 billion worth of free crypto. Here are 2023's biggest crypto airdrops.
It was a big year in crypto for free money . Across blockchain networks, many projects and protocols attempted to weather the enduring bear market by handing out bags upon bags of free, native tokens to loyal users via airdrops .
All in all, this year’s 50 biggest airdrops distributed some $4.56 billion worth of free tokens to crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) users, according to analysis by CoinGecko .
Here’s a look at the 2023 airdrops that clocked in at the top of the list, based on the peak value of each token over the course of this year.
Handily taking gold this year was Ethereum scaler Arbitrum’s massive launch of its native governance token, ARB.
In March, Arbitrum rolled out ARB with airdrops that initially infused projects and DAOs built on the layer-2 network with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free tokens. Projects that benefited from those first airdrops included Treasure DAO, SushiSwap, Dopex, Radiant, Balancer, and Uniswap .