Yes, Airdrops are Dumb. But they don’t have to be. This reaction to this post really got me thinking. Here's a question: Why do IPOs always pop? Simple—it's by design. Every company wants holders instead of dumpers on their cap table. Institutional investors like BlackRock and Fidelity are the long-term holders that every CEO wants as shareholders, so they get offered shares at a discount to where the market is expected to clear. That discount creates the IPO "pop." Retail doesn't get that discount because retail is a swarm—some are holders, some are dumpers, and companies can't tell which is which at the IPO. So retail pays market price. The same dynamic plays out in crypto. VCs and institutions have legible long-term reputations that make them easier to differentiate from mercenary capital. The best value-add investors get preferential access, while retail pays sticker price. But airdrops happen on the transparent blockchains, where you can see which wallets are which. So teams use on-chain data to filter our “farmers” or sybils—people with thousands of accounts faking metrics just to get an airdrop. And yes, that makes sense. But nobody seems to be trying to figure out who is actually going to hold their token or dump it—who are the little baby Blackrocks and Fidelitys who deserve to be rewarded alongside the others value-add investors. Why don't projects do this? The Current State of Airdrops We all know airdrops are broken. Projects spend months attracting farmers who generate artificial activity, only to watch those same farmers dump tokens immediately after TGE. It seems the only solution people propose is to pivot away from airdrops to crowdsales. But it's 2025 now—there's a larger design space we haven't explored. Some projects have moved partway there. Optimism, Arbitrum, and Kaito have all modified their post-TGE incentives to reward long-term holders of their own tokens. But this strategy only works after your token exists. At initial distribution—usually the largest in dollar terms—you don't yet know whether users will hold or fold. The mistake these distributions make is trying to anticipate user behavior solely toward their own token. Instead, you should reward users based on how they've behaved with previous tokens. When BlackRock gets IPO allocations, companies don't know if BlackRock will dump their shares. But they know BlackRock generally hasn’t dumped previous IPOs. They value BlackRock on their track record, rather than by directly tying their hands. It’s crazy that token distributions don’t work this way. To fix airdrops, we need meta-incentives. Your airdrop should incorporate how users behaved in previous airdrops. Once users receive your token, you then need to make their behavior legible to the next project considering an airdrop. Here's a sketch of how this could work: After the airdrop, most teams just publish a list of allocations. Instead, they should continue to publish a Holder Score that updates after TGE: percentage retained over time, delegation/staking/voting participation, product usage, fee payments, liquidity provision, builder contributions....