The Rise of Dubious Airdrops and why it's important to DYOR

Arbitrum famously gave out over a billion ARB tokens to its users recently, giving those that are eligible anywhere from $400 to $1250 worth of ARB. And ever since then, airdrops seem to have a trend.

Just a day after the ARB airdrop, zkSync Network saw it's launch. There have been many articles discussing how to be eligible for a potential $10,000 airdrop on the platform. zkSync was then caught up in the scandal as more than $1.7M of the users' ETH got frozen due to developers' laziness in not testing their contracts. Moreover, when asked, zkSync denies any future airdrops.

I recently came across a video by the youtuber Conner Kenny telling his viewers to get ready for a massive SUI airdrop, however, the commentors on the video noted that thale developers on SUI discord have, once again, denied any possibility of an airdrop. Not only that, even the word airdrop has been banned on their discord due to the massive amounts of misinformation.

Now, you can trust a random commentor under a youtube video just as much as you can trust the youtuber, by that I mean: not at all. There are some people that are speculating the devs are just lying to the users as they want to keep it a secret, so believe what you want to.

So why are these airdrop rumours spreading for not only one but multiple tokens? Is it from people riding regretting missing out on the ARB train? Are the developers the ones using the ARB hype and trying to popularise their platforms then denying the rumours so that they won't actually have to pay up? The answer is, we don't know.

Scammy airdrops have always existed, but right now they appear to be gaining more a lot more traction. As always, DYOR before putting your money anywhere.