Airdrops without getting burned

An airdrop is a project distributing free tokens — to early users, community members, or holders of something else. Real ones exist and have occasionally been genuinely valuable. An entire scam economy is dressed up as them. The difference is learnable in one lesson.

How legitimate airdrops actually work

Only a few shapes exist: tokens simply appear at your address — a snapshot drop, where you did nothing and someone sent them — or you claim from the project's official site, announced through the project's own channels, requiring at most a normal claim transaction. What no legitimate airdrop ever requires: your recovery phrase, a payment to unlock your allocation, or an unusual signature to verify eligibility. Reading eligibility needs no permission at all, which is why Radian's own Arc checker works with just a pasted address.

The trap gallery

• Dusted tokens — strange tokens appear in your wallet uninvited, worthless but named like an invitation. The site is a drainer; ignore dust forever, because interacting is the attack.
• The claim-window ambush — eligible wallets have 48 hours. Urgency is the tell; real distributions do not evaporate.
• The fake announcement — a real project's airdrop, announced on a fake channel. Verify on the project's primary domain, nowhere else.
• Farming pre-sales — paying anyone to increase your allocation for a token that does not exist, currently endemic around the ARC rumour.

If free tokens do land legitimately

• They are probably worth little, and that is fine — the expected value of airdrops is a bonus, not an income.
• Selling them is a swap like any other, including checking whether there is real liquidity to sell into.
• Taxes may apply where you live. Free tokens are often income at receipt; keep records.

You have finished Using Arc. Stages four and five — Tokens & Trading, Staying Safe — arrive with mainnet.