How to Farm the Drift Protocol Airdrop on Solana

Drift Protocol, the largest perpetual swap futures exchange on Solana, just launched a points program. The points program precedes a future airdrop, where Drift will distribute its governance token to community members in an effort to decentralize the protocol.

To date, Drift has seen over $5 billion in volume from around 90,000 users, equating to over $120 million in total value locked in the protocol. The company closed a $23.5 million Series A last October, with contributions from Polychain Capital and Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, among others.  

Drift points will be distributed to users on a weekly basis, and they’ll be giving out 100 million points per week. The protocol’s team has yet to release information on how many tokens will be distributed through the points program in total.

The points will be generated primarily by a user's trading activity. They’re based on a user's prorated trading volume, as well as other activities—such as whether or not they put up liquidity.

The program will last for three months, but the Drift team reassured their community that past actions would also be rewarded, and that several snapshots had been made already to reward “OG users.” One team member also took to Twitter (aka X) to let users know that the program could even end in less than three months, but no longer than that.

How do you farm it?

Drift has openly stated that points will be tied to your prorated trading volume, and that points will be distributed once a week. That means that if in any given week, my activity accounts for 1% of the total volume on Drift, then I will receive 1% of the points distributed that week.

A good rule of thumb when trying to figure out how a protocol will weigh different actions in a points program or airdrop is to think about what the protocol’s goals are.

At its current stage, Drift Protocol appears to be focused on four key metrics: total volume, the number of users, cumulative trades, and the total value locked (TVL). With this in mind, to farm this airdrop, I want to do actions that will increase those numbers.

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In this case, all of these values increase as volume increases—so it’s safe to say that the name of the game here is trading volume. Drift is a perpetual futures exchange, so to do this all you need to do is make a few trades!

A final consideration: Drift Protocol does not serve U.S. residents, so if you’re in the good ol’ Red, White, and Blue, then you’ll have to sit this one out.

Edited by Andrew Hayward