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Claimable or Direct Airdrops — Which is best for you?
Originally published on Medium. View original.
Claimable or Direct Airdrops — Which is best for you?
Direct Airdrops (Directs) and Claimable Airdrops (Claimables) function very differently. As a result they have different security profiles and different costs.
How they work
In the case of Claimables, you send a smart contract a list of possible claims, and the tokens themselves. There are several ways of encoding this data, but those details don’t matter. What matters is that a user wanting to make a claim has to have a wallet that’s in the list. If it is, the user can claim the tokens which are then transferred from the smart contract to the user’s wallet.
In the case of Directs, users are sent tokens. From the users’ perspective, this is friction-free, and cheaper. The token just show up in their wallet. For the sender — usually a protocol or project — it’s more complicated. A project wanting to directly drop tokens into users’ wallets needs to write a script that transfers tokens from the project wallet to the destination wallet. Each of these transfers requires a signature. If an Airdrop is being made to several hundred-thousand wallets, this is a tedious process, even if many transfers can be batched together.
Smart Contracts
A claim system is a smart contract that holds funds until they are claimed. This is an attractive target for hackers. Claim contracts have been hacked, and funds lost.
The advantage of using a claim contract, especially on Solana, is cost. All fees associated with depositing new tokens into a user wallet are paid by the Airdrop recipient, i.e., the user making the claim.
Distribution Scripts
Distribution scripts are less risky but they are more expensive — the sender pays all the fees — and can be tedious to run. Sticking with Solana, transaction data size only allows us to batch approximately 10 transfers at a time. Each transaction requires a signature. That means that a distribution to 5,000 wallets would require 500 signatures!
The TrueTribe Solution
TrueTribe’s platform gives you the best of all worlds, without the risk or hassle.
If a client wants to make Direct Airdrops, they simply transfer all the necessary tokens to TrueTribe. We handle the rest, without human intervention. It’s fast and intuitive. No technical skills required.
If a client wants to make a Claimable Airdrop, they simply send us all the necessary tokens and we do the rest. We automatically set up a claim contract that has been audited by multiple firms and battle-tested. No technical skills required.
In both cases, the entire process is automated, so there’s no room for human error.
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Claimable or Direct Airdrops — Which is best for you? was originally published in TrueTribe on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.