What is Airdrop?

An airdrop is a distribution of tokens to wallets that did not buy them: a project rewards early users, a protocol decentralizes its governance, or a new token seeds itself by landing in thousands of addresses at once. Some airdrops have been worth thousands of dollars per wallet; most are worth nothing, and a growing share are bait.

Legitimate airdrops are usually claimed, not received. The project publishes eligibility, the user visits the official site and signs a claim transaction, and the tokens arrive. Unsolicited tokens that simply appear in a wallet are different: they are either dust, worthless by design, or a lure that leads to a site asking for a signature that drains the wallet.

That makes airdrops a tracking problem twice over. A claimed airdrop is real income with a cost basis of zero and a value on the day of receipt, which matters for taxes. An unsolicited token with a fake price is noise that inflates a portfolio total and clutters every list. The two look identical at the raw level: a token balance that arrived without a purchase.

A tracker has to tell them apart. TrueHold filters spam tokens and dust below a threshold you set, so a wallet with a hundred junk tokens still shows an honest total, while claimed airdrops with real markets are priced and counted like any holding. Never interact with a token you did not claim to see what it is; the interaction is the trap.

Airdrops also arrive with a timing problem. A token that was worth a lot on claim day and little a month later still counts as income at the claim-day value in most tax regimes, so the date and price of receipt matter more than the current price. Keeping the claim transaction visible in history is what makes that number recoverable later.