Analysis of the Airdrop Probability of 11 VC Investment Projects

Original Title: 《Which VC's Investments Are Most Fond of Airdrops?》

Original Author: ardizor

Original Compilation: Odaily Planet Daily

Editor's Note:

For retail investors in the Crypto market, airdrops have always been a hot topic. L1/L2, DeFi, NFT, GameFi, social… Users keen on airdrops will try to interact with more projects across various tracks, thereby leveraging greater potential returns at a low cost.

However, while the industry may make judgments about the airdrop expectations of specific projects, there seems to be a lack of a sufficiently clear logic on how to filter more viable airdrop targets.

In the following text, overseas KOL ardizor has sorted out a group of active VCs in the industry and compiled which projects they have invested in that have conducted airdrops for the community. Finally, he compared the airdrop rates of investment targets among major VCs, and his conclusions may hold certain reference significance for users enthusiastic about airdrops.

The following is a compilation of ardizor's original content by Odaily Planet Daily, with some edits made for reading fluency.

Recently, I (in the first-person perspective of ardizor) wanted to understand which VC's invested projects are more fond of airdrops, and how the airdrop rates of investment targets differ among different VCs.

Here is my analysis process.

I selected 11 well-known VCs in the industry and created a database. Then, I conducted a large-scale organization of all disclosed investments made by these VCs in recent years and filtered out the projects that have conducted airdrops.

To obtain the desired data more accurately, I referred to the records of the following major databases:

Crypto Fundraising: https://crypto-fundraising.info

DefiLlama: https://defillama.com/raises

Cypherhunter: https://cypherhunter.com/en/discover/

Crunchbase: https://crunchbase.com

The final results are shown in the figure below:

Among the investment targets of Coinbase Ventures, 15 have conducted airdrops, including notable projects like The Graph, Biconomy, Gnosis Safe, and Aptos.

Binance follows closely in terms of quantity, with 12 projects among its investment targets having conducted airdrops, including Sei, Maverick Protocol, and Space ID—this is also an advantage of Binance as the industry's leading CEX compared to other VCs.

Next are the two major leading VCs, a16z and Paradigm, with 9 and 8 projects that have conducted airdrops among their investment targets, respectively. Representative airdrop "works" include Uniswap, dYdX, Optimism, and so on.

Following them are several VCs such as Polychain, Multicoin, Pantera, Jump, Blockchain Capital, and Variant, with the number of projects that have conducted airdrops among their investment targets ranging from 3 to 7.

The last one on the list is Sequoia Capital, with only Hooked Protocol having conducted an airdrop among its investment targets, indicating that the "traditional" top internet VCs indeed have a different approach in the cryptocurrency field.

So, is this analysis the end? Not really. To conclude which VCs prefer airdrops in their investments, I decided to calculate the airdrop rate of investment targets for each major VC using simple division (number of airdropped projects / total number of investments).

The final conclusion is shown in the figure below:

With a relatively low number of investments, Binance tops the list with an airdrop rate of 15.4%.

Following closely is Paradigm with an airdrop rate of 11.6%, making it another VC with an airdrop rate exceeding 10%.

Due to a higher number of investments, Coinbase Ventures, which topped the previous list, falls to the mid-level with an airdrop rate of 6.9%. Similar situations include a16z, Multichain, Jump, and Polychain.

Sequoia Capital remains the lowest, with an airdrop rate of only 1.7%.

Summary

The above is the data statistics and analysis conclusions made by ardizor.

It should be noted that the above content only provides a relatively rough analysis method. Clearly, this method is objectively influenced by many factors, such as VCs not necessarily disclosing all investment situations, and the varying preferences of different VCs in style (for example, some VCs prefer infrastructure projects that do not issue tokens) and cycle selection. The statistics also do not account for specific airdrop amounts.

However, it must be said that ardizor's analysis still provides a relatively intuitive picture of the somewhat vague airdrop market (even if it's just one perspective), which may help users enthusiastic about airdrops make choices when facing a vast array of interaction targets.