How did a fresh college graduate turn 3,000 yuan into 3 million?
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How did a fresh college graduate turn 3,000 yuan into 3 million?
Web3 airdrops pave the way to financial freedom for college students.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Kiki, Biteye's junior sister
Editor: Crush, core contributor at Biteye
01 Introduction
They say college graduates today face unemployment right after graduation. I didn't believe it—until I became another victim of this curse.
Unemployment wasn't sustainable, so when I saw my former employer, Biteye, still hiring, I swallowed my pride and asked the boss if I could come back—tearfully confessing how regretful I was for leaving in the first place…
Luckily, a previous intern—a senior of mine—had just quit, leaving an open position. I quickly re-joined as an operations staff member.
I was lamenting the tough job market, thinking his departure would make it hard to find another role like his, when suddenly—bam!—I learned he left because he achieved financial freedom. OMG!
Collective failure is scary, but a colleague’s success? That truly stings. Indeed, sometimes the gap between people is wider than that between humans and dogs!
Determined to achieve the same success, I pestered him relentlessly (by treating him to meals) until I finally uncovered some details.
02 My Senior's Entry into Crypto
My senior entered the crypto space around 2021—an era unforgettable to those who were already in the industry.
Back then, hands in pockets, he had no rivals.
Starting from being introduced to Shib, he later hit gold with Baby Doge. With just 3,000 RMB in capital, he aggressively invested in various meme coins and rode the animal-themed token craze to briefly grow his portfolio to seven figures.
Baby Doge in June 2021
While this amount might seem trivial compared to what top players earned, for a twenty-something young adult, growing from nothing to millions within months felt like a dream.
And indeed, it was a dream—one that soon shattered.
As the hype around meme coins faded, their prices began crashing one after another. He kept hoping for a rebound before exiting, but each time, the price hit a new low.
In the end, all gains evaporated—he was back to square one.
In early 2022, he restarted his journey with the same 3,000 RMB, but this time, he turned to airdrop farming.
03 First Big Win
Like many others, his airdrop journey began with Galaxy—the so-called "origin of all evil" (though nowadays Galaxy has betrayed its users by planning to charge fees and is widely criticized).
Due to limited capital, he immediately experienced the pain of missing out—literally feeling like slapping his thighs in regret.
At the time, most NFT trading happened on OpenSea. While OpenSea had massive traffic, it operated in a centralized way and charged high transaction fees. It quietly made huge profits but never issued a token.
This was unacceptable in the Web3 world, where decentralization is sacred. So many projects claimed they’d dethrone OpenSea. “You won’t issue a token? Fine—I’ll do it for you!”
Soon enough, talk became reality. A project named OpenDAO, sounding similar to OpenSea, started distributing airdrops. Each eligible user received $SOS tokens worth a few hundred dollars—just for being an OpenSea user.
He told me that afternoon when he heard the news, he was waiting for the subway. He felt excitement—but also anxiety. At the time, every NFT interaction on mainnet cost tens of dollars. He often hesitated to spend.
But the moment he opened the airdrop page, all complex emotions vanished. One word echoed in his mind: regret. So much damn regret.
Yet this outcome was predictable. It’s like students who never study but hope to ace exams through sudden inspiration, grading errors, or sheer luck. Not gonna happen.
After this blow, he decided to stop being stingy. With the mindset of “if I lose it all, fine—I can always go work at a factory,” he started following airdrop influencers and completing Galaxy Girl tasks.
Though he still couldn’t afford mainnet activities, he completed every other possible task. In the end, he didn’t get the top-tier Galaxy Girl NFT, but he earned several thousand dollars in airdrops—his first real capital.
04 Early Gains
With some initial funds, the projects he explored started getting more sophisticated.
For example, a Weibo influencer once claimed that simply staking ATOM would lead to endless airdrops. He was tempted and considered buying 100 ATOMs to stake fully.
But after researching, he realized he needed to set up a Keplr wallet and navigate multiple chains—too complicated. So he gave up.
Thankfully. Those ATOMs were priced at dozens of dollars back then; now they’re worth about $4.
Not only were there few meaningful airdrops, but the staking threshold increased from 5 ATOM to much higher levels. Later, many projects even excluded ATOM stakers entirely.
If he’d bought ATOM at peak prices and held until now, he’d probably be crying nonstop.
Still lacking deep knowledge, after abandoning ATOM staking, he wasn’t sure what else to do. Seeing other influencers farm layer2 airdrops—like ARB and ZK—he followed suit, creating around a dozen accounts per project.
A few months later, he started exploring Starknet, but found it too slow and difficult to use. After setting up just five accounts, he gave up.
During this period, he encountered several failed projects, like privacy-focused Aztec, which disappeared mid-way.
For about half a year, there were no airdrops. He admitted he seriously considered quitting the space. The farming golden age seemed over, yet he hadn’t earned enough. It felt deeply unsatisfying.
This dull phase ended abruptly in March 2023, when the legendary ARB airdrop brought massive rewards to farmers.
His 15 accounts netted 30,000 ARB tokens. He sold them all immediately at launch—earning roughly $40,000. Enough to buy a Tesla outright.
He secretly told me that the cost of farming ARB was extremely low—maybe $10–$20 per account. That means each account returned over 100x. No wonder it was called a “big airdrop.”
Looking at today’s airdrops—small, full of witch filters and traps—it’s heartbreaking in comparison.
Following the ARB airdrop, the entire airdrop space entered a FOMO frenzy. Numerous studios and even ordinary people rushed into farming.
Seeing everyone intensify their efforts, he didn’t dare slack off. As soon as his ARB profits landed, he reinvested immediately—setting up dozens of ZK mainnet accounts and reviving his old Starknet ones. Every day was busy. It truly felt like falling behind by even a step meant losing big money.
Fresh off a major win, his motivation soared. Over the next two to three months, he focused on boosting ZK transaction counts. During this time, CyberConnect launched its token. As a sibling project to Galaxy, he naturally participated. Though the airdrop was modest (“just enough for pork chop rice”), it covered his ZK interaction costs.
Then came a wave of small meme coin airdrops on chains like ARB (Aidoge) and ZK (Cheems). Individually insignificant, but numerous—enough to turn his farming into a negative-cost operation.
05 Hitting Seven Figures
The next turning point came in July 2023. He somehow heard rumors that top farmers were shifting focus to Starknet. Could the big one finally be coming?
Seeing a clear spike in Starknet’s address count—and with Zksync still silent on airdrops—he gritted his teeth, bet everything he had on Starknet, and went all-in. “If I die, I die!”
By then, many studios were already using fingerprint browsers and sync tools to boost efficiency. If you don’t know what these are, no worries—they’re just tools to streamline operations.
But he insisted manual work was safer. Automation saved time, but if caught, the penalty outweighed the benefits.
His strategy: manual operations, large cross-chain deposits, small transactions and large loans, then withdraw most funds while leaving a small balance in each account—to appear more like real users, haha.
The summer break offered two months free of academic pressure—perfect for aggressive account creation.
That summer, he created 100 new accounts, ensuring each remained active weekly on-chain.
Only after school resumed in September did he reduce frequency—from weekly to biweekly, eventually monthly activity. Still, he maintained consistent engagement across most accounts.
By late 2023, I had just entered the space. Honestly, the second half of 2023 was mostly flat. Yet even then, he almost got rich again. (Wait—why did I say “again”? Sigh…)
During that summer of intense interactions, he casually minted an inscription called ethi for $50.
He didn’t know what it was. When it rose to $2,500, he sold. He said if he’d held until December, it might’ve been worth $100,000 (seriously??). That was his closest brush with instant wealth.
By year-end 2023, aside from inscriptions, the only bright spot was FriendTech. (Just checked the news—looks like FriendTech has now renounced contract ownership and given up completely...)
By this point, he seemed far more skilled. Instead of buying KOL keys, he invested several ETH into building his own matrix of accounts.
Despite setbacks—rule changes by the team, Twitter bans—he managed to keep most accounts alive.
Then, right after the New Year 2024, good news arrived: Starknet airdrop was live.
He said checking the airdrop felt more nerve-wracking than checking his college entrance exam results. After reviewing the criteria and manually verifying a few large accounts, he knew he’d made it.
The final result? Around 100 out of 110 accounts qualified (the disqualified ones lacked sufficient 3-month activity—unfortunate). Total haul: over 100,000 STRK tokens.
I secretly checked STRK’s opening price on Day 1—it easily reached $2 per token. That means 100,000 tokens = ~1.5 million RMB. Insane!
One Starknet rule disqualified many: accounts must retain a minimum balance.
Yet all his accounts met this requirement. Curious, I asked how he thought of that. He said he just wanted leftover funds to cover future gas fees—pure luck. But I think he’s being modest.
Anyway, through a mix of luck and months of effort, his net worth likely crossed A7 during graduation year. (A7 means seven-digit asset value—minimum 1,000,000. I didn’t ask whether it started with 1 or 9—we both know his Starknet win alone pushed him to A7.15.)
06 Continued Harvesting
Starknet set a strong tone for 2024. After that, it was like he activated a printing press—harvesting airdrop after airdrop.
He successfully farmed 10 Bitcoin Smiley NFTs and hundreds of Babylons NFTs—each yielding tens of thousands in profit.
In March–April, cross-chain bridge Wormhole announced its airdrop. Despite only one high-value interaction (bridging to Sei), he received 8,000 USDT per account.
By May, FriendTech arrived. His pre-built matrix earned over 20,000 tokens—sold for ~$30,000.
June brought Pizza airdrop—a huge surprise: Back in February, he used 100 wallets to enter Bitsmiley whitelist lotteries on OKX. By early May, he consolidated those BTC into Solv Protocol for staking. This resulted in nearly every wallet having at least one transaction—accidentally qualifying him for 8,000 Pizza tokens.
Truly manna from heaven. Colleagues said they feasted for days (I hadn’t rejoined Biteye yet—missed out🙃).
After this series of windfalls, he finally felt “done.” So he quit his job.
The rest you know—just as described at the beginning. Soon after, I interviewed and rejoined Biteye. We smoothly transitioned roles. Everyone wins, with bright futures ahead.
07 No More Airdrops!
Good times don’t last. Prosperity inevitably decays—that’s the eternal cycle.
After three years of anticipation, ZK finally launched its token. But strangely, my senior wasn’t happy.
Because only one of his accounts received over 10,000 tokens. Most were marked “Not eligible.” Total: only tens of thousands of tokens. Worse—he still hasn’t sold any of them…
Another cross-chain project, LayerZero, was even worse—earning less than the generous Wormhole drop. Thirty accounts combined sold for just $1,000. You could call it anti-farming.
Indeed, most airdrops in the second half turned “anti-farming.” Luckily, he avoided most of them.
But the bear market still crushed his portfolio: his remaining Smiley NFTs are near zero, 100 Babylons NFTs now worth under $50 each, FriendTech proceeds converted to ETH (which dropped), Pizza swapped to BTC (also down), and whatever STRK he held? Almost wiped out...
With assets shrinking and no new airdrops incoming, though he never mentioned regretting quitting, I could clearly sense some remorse.
But it’s too late now, haha. Only option? Wait for little me to get rich again—and hand the seat back to my senior!
08 Summary
He keeps saying it was just luck—and favorable farming conditions over the past two years—that led to his success.
I agree conditions mattered, but personal skill clearly played a role too. Otherwise, during that bull run, why wasn’t I the one getting rich? 😭
In reflecting on his journey, I noticed two key abilities consistently present whenever he scored big airdrops.
First: filtering ability. He could identify over 90% of scam projects, filter out spammy or low-quality influencers—allowing him to focus energy on legitimate opportunities.
Second: execution power. Manually managing interactions across dozens or even hundreds of accounts demands immense discipline and stamina.
At the time, he was a low-pressure master’s student. Strong filtering skills, ample time, and solid execution enabled his remarkable farming success.
Though the airdrop scene is now bleak, my conversation with him taught me a great deal. I hope that when the next big airdrop comes, we’ll all be ready—catch the wave and finally make it ashore! 🥰
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