@road
From farming airdrops to selling watermelons in Dagestan
In 2022-2024, one of my close friends and I were deep in the airdrop trenches.
We farmed almost everything.
$ARB, $OP, $W, $ZRO and probably around 100 different drops over the whole cycle
Bridges, testnets, quests, wallets, Discord roles, gas, eligibility criteria, sybil paranoia, spreadsheets, random forms at 3am.
The full farmer lifestyle
For a while, it actually worked
We caught some pretty solid drops. Not "retire forever" money, but enough to believe that clicking buttons on 17 chains was a valid career path.
Then the meta started dying.
Airdrops became worse.
Criteria became more random.
Teams became better at extracting free users.
Farmers became exit liquidity for "community allocation".
And every new project started acting like your time, gas, and attention were free.
I rotated into ICOs, pre-markets, DeFi yield, and other ways to lose money with more sophisticated terminology.
My friend made a much cleaner decision:
He left crypto.
Now he sells watermelons in Dagestan.
And honestly?
He might be the only one of us who actually found product-market fit.
His current setup:
ā buys watermelons at ~$0.32
ā sells them at ~$1
ā spread: ~$0.68
ā markup: 212.5%
ā gross margin: 68%
The funniest part is that he probably makes more per month now than the average airdrop farmer who stayed in the trenches burning time, gas, and mental health for a "potential retroactive reward".
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