Yes, airdrops are free crypto tokens and coins. But there are still dangers that you have to be aware of. The good thing will be to read our tutorial on how to safely participate in the airdrops before continuing to this article. Even if the airdrops are free you are investing your time and usually some sort of your personal information.We have prepared the tips on how to be sure that your time involving in the airdrop is well spent, and how will you minimize the risks that your personal information that you have shared with the cryptocurrency project be compromised. It is all about the legitimacy of the project. To be sure that your airdrops tokens will be distributed to you, and once they are distributed that they will have a legit chance of gaining a real value. Of course, nobody is telling you that you have to invest a couple of hours or days in doing your research just to participate in the crypto airdrops. That is why we have prepared a couple of quick tips on how to spot the legit projects. This is not the 100% proof method of how to spot scam coins (that can be tricky), but it will be good enough to decide to participate in the airdrop since you are not investing your money into the project but mainly your time.

1. Check the website

The first thing to do is to check the website. If the site has the same template that you have seen on the countless crypto website you are already starting to get a feeling about the project on a quick look. You know what are we talking about. If there is a slider with particles moving on mouse hover, that you have seen dozens of times already you will start to ask questions. That is usually followed by the ICO countdown timer. If the website is mainly for ICO purpose and for spreading the information about the project, but other factors are legit (real-life implementation, valid team information, legit whitepapers, reasonable road map, then there is probably nothing wrong with these projects and you cannot conclude participating in the airdrop just from website information.

But if the project selling point is the website platform or application of any kind and if that platform is built in WordPress that is some serious red exclamation mark. There is nothing wrong with WordPress, heck even our platform is built in WordPress. WordPress is a great and well-documented platform. But simple it is not efficient to support large-scale cryptocurrency web applications. And since it is a very popular platform security risks are reasonably high. If you are not familiar with how to check if the website is built in WordPress press CTRL + U to open the website code. Then press CTRL + F to search for the keyword “wp”. If there are more than 30-40 mentioning of the work “wp” site is built in WordPress.

2. Check the team and whitepapers

On the website there MUST be information about the team and whitepapers. Team members needs to have photos and LinkedIn links. Quick method to check images if you are using Chrome is right click on the image and “Search Google for image”. It is not the best method to check for scam but it is the quickies. It will show you if the image of the team member was used elsewhere.

If the website does not have whitepapers it is another big red exclamation mark. If the whitepapers are poorly written, if they have only a couple of pages with a main focus on the ICO and tokens sale it is another scam mark. But if you want to go deeper and do more research about the whitepapers do a plagiarization check use one of the great online tools and copy part of the whitepapers into it to check it.

3. Check if website is on one of the ICO reviews websites

Useful thing is to check if the project is listed on one of the ICO review websites. Today most popular are ICObench and ICOmarks. Of course, that doesn’t mean that high-rated projects are 100% scam proof since recently was founded out how easy is to manipulate ratings on ICO review sites, but it can give you useful information that is valuable in deciding if you want to participate in the airdrop. On our platform, we are providing information from the ICOmarks if the project is rated there.

4. Check if the project is listed on the CoinMarketCap

If the project is listed on CoinMarketCap that it is a high plus for the airdrop. Of course, it is a big difference if the project is in the top 100 or it is between 1000 and 2000 place, but this information is very important as you will find out the real token value and where you can trade it (hopefully, if the volume is big enough). AirdropsMob is also providing the information if the project is listed on CoinMarketCap just next to the name of the project.

5. Calculate the real value of the airdrop

For most airdrops, the value is calculated by the ICO price. But, you have to take that estimation with a large pinch of salt. Realistically most of that projects will never have a successful ICO campaign and they will never hit the exchanges. In those cases even if your airdrop tokens are dropped they will never have an actual value. But if the project has passed all the above steps then there is a real chance that you will gain a value of the airdrop tokens eventually.

In some cases, the airdrop value is calculated from the real market value. You can check if the project is listed on the CoinMarketCap. Usually, these airdrops have smaller values, but their strength is that they possess an actual value. That value can be respectful once after we hopefully see the light at the end of this long crypto winter and if the project is strong and legit.

Sometimes tokens are dropped on the project platform as a utility token that can be used on the platform instead of your wallet. In those cases, you will have to decide if you will use the platform in the future and is it worth taking the time and participate in the airdrop. It is the same cases for the airdrops from the crypto exchanges that can be used as trade fees.