Turning airdrop points into dollars

The core formula

Expected value equals your share of total points, multiplied by the share of supply allocated to the program, multiplied by fully-diluted valuation at launch. Written out: EV = (my points ÷ total points) × allocation % × FDV.

Every term is estimable. Venues that publish a fixed weekly emission — StandX at 200,000 points per week, for example — hand you the denominator directly. Venues that publish an allocation percentage, like Reya at 45% or Variational at roughly 50%, hand you the second term. FDV is the noisy one, and the honest approach is to run three scenarios rather than a single number.

Bounding FDV without fooling yourself

The useful anchors are comparable launches rather than narratives. Recent perp DEX launches cluster in a wide band, and the sensible move is to take the median of the closest comparables by volume and open interest, then run a bear case at a third of it and a bull case at triple.

Also adjust for float. An airdrop that unlocks immediately with no vesting — as Lighter did with 25% of supply — is worth substantially more than the same nominal allocation released in twelve monthly tranches, because you can actually realise the first while the second is exposed to a year of price risk and claim deadlines.

• Bear: one third of the comparable median, with vesting applied.
• Base: comparable median, adjusted for how much of your allocation unlocks at launch.
• Bull: triple the median, which is what happens when a launch catches a market-wide bid.

Cost basis: what the points actually cost you

Divide total fees paid on the venue by points earned to get your cost per point. This single number tells you whether to continue: if your cost per point is $0.004 and the base-case value per point is $0.02, you are buying at a fifth of estimated value and should keep going. If the ratio has inverted because volume tripled while emissions stayed fixed, stop — the farm has been repriced against you.

Recomputing this weekly is what separates farming from gambling. Emissions are usually fixed while participation is not, so the value per point almost always declines over a program's life. Entering early and reassessing often is the whole edge.

Where these estimates go wrong

Three assumptions break most models. Sybil filtering can remove a large share of the point supply after the fact, which raises the value of legitimate points — a rare upside surprise. Retroactive weighting can reward early users far above their point balance, which is why pre-points venues sometimes outperform published programs. And allocation percentages are often quoted for the whole community, including future seasons, so treating the full percentage as available to the current season overstates value materially.