Introducing Airstreams: An End-to-End Solution for Vesting Airdrops

Airstreams. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? In this blog post, we're excited to unveil the innovative mechanism we've meticulously crafted for the past six months. We'll dive into how it works and the unique advantages it brings to the table.

Before starting, and to make things extra clear about how awesome Airstreams is as a product, note that it's entirely free to use. Zero fees besides gas costs.

The Problem

Airdrops have become a routine in the crypto industry. Over the years, it has become the standard way of launching a new token, and for good reasons: it’s a great way to give ownership of a project to the right people.

However, the traditional way of doing airdrops is flawed. Most airdrop recipients claim the tokens only to sell them right away, and the interest these airdrops gather is short-lived.

The big problem with simple, one-time airdrops is that they don’t create the right incentives for community members. They don’t incentivize long-term thinking.

This is a major problem because community members are the backbone of a crypto project, and losing most of them immediately after the airdrop isn’t great.

The solution to this problem is extremely elegant and creates the right incentives for community members to think from a long-term perspective. It will guarantee that the community will keep the project’s future as their first and foremost priority.

That solution is called Airstreams.

The Solution

Airstreams is our end-to-end solution for vesting airdrops.

Instead of airdropping all of the tokens all at once, recipients get them in tranches via Sablier token streams—basically, like an on-chain vesting plan.

An airstream can have a duration of days, weeks, months, or even years. You could, for example, vest the airdrop of your new token over 4 years. Or 6 months. You get to choose.

The beauty is that the community members are forced to think long-term and keep the project’s future as their first and foremost priority. They are forced to because instead of receiving all the tokens at once, they receive them over time.

Airstreams not only create the right incentives but also ensure that the price of your token won’t crash on day one. This has been the case for many airdrops, where many airdrops are dumped immediately.

How it works

To create an airstream campaign, you upload a CSV file with a list of recipients, specifically their addresses and allocated amounts. You can do this using the Sablier interface, which can generate airstream campaigns with up to 50k recipients (yes, you read that right – 50,000):

Our spreadsheet feature is the perfect fit for airstreams: it allows you to upload a CSV file with the recipients, and the interface will create an airstream campaign from which every recipient can claim their share.

Another great advantage of Airstreams is that creating a campaign with lots of recipients won't ruin you in terms of gas fees. Launching a campaign means deploying a smart contract with a constant-size Merkle proof associated with your user data. The streams are created only when each recipient claims the streams.

The Sablier interface is designed to automatically generate the Merkle tree for you by default, but there is also the possibility of generating the tree manually using our open-source API.

Let's go over some noteworthy properties of Airstreams:

1. Recipients pay the gas fees themselves to create and start the stream when they claim (the claim action creates the stream). Creating a campaign with thousands of recipients would be incredibly costly if the campaign creator had to pay for all the gas fees.
2. You keep full control over unclaimed Airstream token allocations. You can set an optional expiration date, after which you can recover all tokens that have not been claimed.
3. You don't have to fund the campaign directly in order to deploy it. You can deploy the campaign contract now and fund it later when you feel comfortable doing so.

What happens after claiming?

Once a recipient claims, the vesting period begins. Each recipient will receive a unique payment link, which they can use to track and withdraw their airdropped tokens. Withdrawing is a separate transaction.

If they don’t want to withdraw the streamed tokens immediately, that’s OK. They are in good hands with Sablier.

Sablier is a fully decentralized protocol that has been running on Mainnet since 2019 without any hacks, with a median monthly TVL of $152M between 2021 and 2023.

We take great care in ensuring the safety of the tokens streamed using our protocol, and security is and will always remain our first and foremost priority.

Airstreams are built on top of the Sablier V2 Protocol, which has been reviewed by multiple smart contract auditors, including senior security researchers at Cantina. You can see all of the audits here.

Conclusion

Airstreams provide a much better way to distribute tokens than traditional airdrops. Vesting makes community members aligned with the project’s interests and think from a long-term perspective.

Did you know that creating an Airstream campaign is entirely free-... OK, fine, you probably know about this by now!

If you are launching a new token, use Sablier Airstreams.

• Want to get started? Check out the user interface here.
• Want a demo? Fill out this form, and we will reach out to you.
• Have a question, idea, or issue? Ping us on Discord or Twitter.