Web2.0 boomer here. Can someone ELI5 what is an, "Airdrop?"
Some times they're designed to incentivize certain activities, like promoting the coin or participating in something.
As a marketing tactic, they work quite well. Crypto fans will do surprisingly large amounts of free PR and free work for "free" tokens.
From an economic perspective, if a token system is giving out free money to large numbers of people it's effectively inflating away the value of the coin. Ironic given the initial anti-inflation ethos that drove the early days of cryptocurrency.
If you squint even Bitcoin had an airdrop: Bitcoin has been in an inflationary regime for its entire history and for a while was giving out Bitcoin to anybody who ran the right program on their laptop.