On this page5
Airdrops vs Real Users and Why Forced Onchain Activity Fails
Forcing onchain actions with incentives brings in people who are there for the reward, and they leave when the reward ends. Onchain activity should happen because the product is useful, with incentives as a thank-you on top. If you want users who stay, fix onboarding and retention first and reward real usage second.
Why do incentive campaigns attract farmers instead of users?
Incentives are one of the things that make Web3 different, and I am not against them. My problem is with campaigns that make an onchain action the price of entry: bridge here, swap there, mint this, and you qualify.
The fact that projects are trying to force on-chain actions by users is just alarming! what differentiates web3 from web2 is the incentivization pie, but onchain actions are supposed to be natural than induced. otherwise you'll have short term airdrop farmers v/s real users Shilika Jain on X, 1 Sep 2024
The logic is easy to follow. When you pay for an action, you attract the people who are best at performing actions for pay. They are organised, they run many wallets, and they are comparing your reward against ten others that week. A person who needs your product is slower and less efficient than that, so a task-based campaign ends up selecting for the wrong crowd.
I said a blunter version of this in 2022, and I still stand by it.
In Web3, projects don't acquire users but rather they acquire bots! Shilika Jain on X, 7 Oct 2022
What is wrong with chasing TVL, FDV and wallet counts?
These numbers are easy to move with money, which is exactly why they are weak evidence of demand. A dashboard that climbs during a points season mostly tells you how attractive the reward was.
if web3 teams didn't focus on TVL, FDV, free airdrops and other bs stuff, then we would have more serious and real users v/s gamblers and airdrop farmers! Shilika Jain on X, 1 Sep 2024
The deeper issue is where the activity comes from. Much of what looks like growth on a new chain is the same capital and the same wallets moving in from the last one.
the value accrual on every chain is by users migrating from one chain to another just to hunt $$$ Shilika Jain on X, 27 Oct 2023
In that same post I said education, onboarding, engagement and retention are badly broken in Web3. Those four are the unglamorous work that incentive campaigns let teams postpone. I also said around then that onboarding was poor and that the questing platforms of the time were full of bots. A quest can fill the top of a funnel that has nothing underneath it.
How can I tell if my users are real or just farming?
In August 2024 I listed the questions that keep running through my mind about this space. One of them was whether users are in it for incentives or for use cases. You can ask that about your own project with data you already have. These checks are general reasoning, not a formula:
| Signal | Farmer pattern | Real user pattern |
|---|---|---|
| Activity after the snapshot or campaign end | Drops off sharply | Continues at a similar pace |
| Transaction shape | Minimum size, minimum count to qualify | Varies with actual need |
| Behaviour with the reward | Claimed and sold quickly | Held, used or staked in the product |
| Community questions | "When token?" and eligibility rules | How the product works, feature requests |
| Source of arrival | Quest boards and airdrop lists | Referrals, content, search, partners |
If most of your base sits in the left column, your marketing bought traffic. It did not win users.
What should a Web3 team do instead of forcing onchain actions?
My short answer has been the same since 2022.
slapping incentives on everything is not important! Shilika Jain on X, 26 Dec 2022
In practice that means changing the order of work:
- Start with the use case. Be able to say in one sentence what a person can do with your product that they could not do before. If that sentence is weak, no reward will fix it.
- Invest in education and onboarding. Clear guides, plain-language explainers and a first session that works without a tutorial thread do more for retention than a points programme.
- Reward behaviour that already happened. Recognising people who used the product before any reward was announced is much harder to farm than a published task list.
- Tie rewards to the core action. If you do run incentives, reward the thing your product exists for, repeated over time, and not a one-off click.
- Report retention, not totals. Lead your updates with how many people came back, and treat TVL and wallet counts as context.
- Go after a smaller, sharper audience. A few hundred people who understand what you built are worth more than a large list that will leave after the claim.
smart followers over airdrop hunters any day! Shilika Jain on X, 26 May 2025
This is slower, and the launch-week chart will look less impressive. It also gives you a community that still exists three months later. If you are building the plan from scratch, my crypto go-to-market strategy playbook covers the sequencing, and the community growth page explains how I approach the audience side.
Should I still run an airdrop?
You can. An airdrop is a distribution and communication event, and it can be done well. The damage comes from how teams treat the community around it.
I think the web3 space can become better when projects don't rug their communities in the name of airdrops. Shilika Jain on X, 25 Nov 2025
I have also written about projects that get hyped by investors and community, launch a token, and then keep building with no visible motivation to give anything back. I called it a slow existence, because it is not a clear rug pull but it feels like one to holders. Whether or not that was the team's intent, it is the story the community tells afterwards.
So if you run an airdrop, treat the communication as seriously as the mechanics:
- Publish the criteria and the reasoning behind them in plain words.
- Do not change the rules late without explaining why.
- Say what the token is for after the claim, and what you will ship next.
- Keep showing up after the token goes live, because that is when people decide whether to stay.
I go deeper on the communication plan in the crypto airdrop PR strategy playbook, and on what to do after the token is live in post-TGE PR for the first 90 days.
## Posts this piece is built on - 1 Sep 2024: the fact that projects are trying to force on-chain actions - 1 Sep 2024: if web3 teams didn't focus on TVL, FDV, free airdrops - 7 Oct 2022: In Web3, projects don't acquire users - 27 Oct 2023: honestly education, onboarding, engagement and retention - 26 Oct 2023: web3 onboarding and current questing platforms - 22 Aug 2024: web3 is quite an interesting space and I love it - 26 May 2025: smart followers over airdrop hunters any day - 26 Dec 2022: slapping incentives on everything is not important - 25 Nov 2025: I think the web3 space can become better - 6 Mar 2025: the worst thing about crypto/web3 is that certain projects get too hyped up
Planning an airdrop or points campaign and worried about who it will attract? Tell me about the launch and I will help you shape the incentives and the communication around real users.