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Points of Focus
- Of 46 major 2026 airdrop tokens old enough to assess, 35 trade below their first-week price, with a median decline of 48%.
- In the median airdrop, 73% of claimers moved some of their allocation within 24 hours and only 23% still held at least half after 30 days.
- A linked group of 11,204 wallets collected 87% of claimed ROBO, while lookalike tokens appeared around more than half of the launches studied.
Three-quarters of major 2026 airdrop tokens with enough trading history have fallen below their first-week price, while recipients typically began moving allocations within hours of claiming them.
Bitquery analyzed 51 Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) airdrops launched between Jan. 1 and Sept. 29. The sample covers 2.02 million claimer wallets across Ethereum, BNB Chain, Base and Arbitrum. Each distribution reached at least 5,000 wallets and carried at least $1 million in claim-day value.
Airdrop claimers moved tokens within hours
Across the median distribution, 73% of recipients transferred at least some tokens within 24 hours. One month later, 23% still held half or more of their original allocation; after three months, that figure fell to 8%.
Bitquery counts any onward transfer, including movements to another wallet, a centralized exchange or a decentralized exchange (DEX). Onchain data therefore shows movement without establishing whether a recipient sold the tokens. Once funds reach a centralized exchange, subsequent trading may disappear from public view.
The same boundary appears in investigations tracking stolen or suspicious funds, including the Coldcard-linked Bitcoin theft, the fake GIWA network and the recent Bitget hack.
Allocations were also highly concentrated. The largest 10% of claimers received 73% of tokens in the median drop, while the top 1% collected 34%. Bitquery identified linked-wallet groups containing 11% of claimers in the median distribution.
ROBO shows the strongest linked-wallet concentration
ROBO produced the most extreme case. A separate wallet-level investigation linked 11,204 claim addresses that collected 285.6 million ROBO, equal to 87% of all tokens claimed.
Bitquery traced the wallets’ setup funds to withdrawals from seven exchanges. The tokens later moved through hundreds of collector addresses before reaching Bitget, where the public trace ends.
Tokens copying the names or symbols of legitimate projects appeared around 27 of the 51 launches and were pushed into wallets 5.6 million times, sometimes before official claims opened. Similar tactics have appeared in lookalike crypto infrastructure and poisoned links targeting wallet users.
CAT accounts for 41% of the $848M total
One token heavily skews the study’s aggregate claim-day value. The study puts combined claim-day value at $848.2 million, though CAT accounts for $351.7 million, or roughly 41% of the total.
CAT is an unlisted BNB Chain token valued using decentralized exchange trades. Excluding it leaves about $496 million across the other 50 distributions. Seven unlisted tokens contribute $370.9 million of the headline total, compared with $477.3 million for 44 listed tokens.
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