Presales vs Airdrops: Which Paid Me More Per Hour of Research?

Quick breakdown of how much money I actually made per hour from chasing a crypto presale vs farming an airdrop.

I treat this like a job. I log hours, track payouts, and ask one question: “What paid me more per hour of research?”

Here’s what I found: 👇

1. Airdrops (a.k.a. “free money if you’re early”)

Example: Arbitrum. When ARB launched its token, they dropped over 1 billion tokens to early users. Over 600k wallets were eligible.

Some wallets got a lot more. A handful of heavy users got 10,250 ARB each, which translated to five figures at claim time.
For me, qualifying for a “decent” airdrop usually looks like:

• Bridging funds
• Doing swaps, staking, adding liquidity
• Using testnet stuff before it’s cool
• Coming back every few weeks so I look like a real user (not a bot)

Call it ~8–10 hours total across a few months.

2. Crypto presales (a.k.a. “I’m basically angel investing with meme money”)

Now let’s talk crypto presales / presale crypto coins. I’m talking launchpads, IDOs, IEOs, early rounds before first CEX listing.

Now here’s where it gets interesting for ROI per hour.

My process for a new crypto presale:

• Read litepaper / tokenomics / vesting
• Check the team (are they doxxed? shipping anything?)

That’s usually 2–3 hours max. Sometimes less if it’s on a platform I already trust as one of the best crypto presale platforms.

Let’s say I put in $500.
Token lists 5× (which is not crazy for a halfway decent launchpad listing — 5× is actually below the 7× average reported for some 2024–2025 IEOs).

$2,000 profit off ~3 hours of work = ~$666/hour.

3. So, which paid me more per hour of actual work?

If I’m honest:

• Airdrops = lower risk, slower money, more manual grunt work. Feels like mining with your time.
• Crypto presales = higher risk, faster money, less total effort. Feels like startup investing.

How I’m doing it now

I split:

• I still farm potential airdrops on L2s / infra plays because it’s basically lottery tickets for future “free” claims.
• I also build a watchlist of upcoming crypto presales and try to filter for teams shipping something real (not just hype).

I track all this in one place because I got tired of 20 tabs. Right now I log allocations, vesting, and raise data for each crypto presale.

And yes, I do keep an eye on new drops, one that stood out was Digitap Presale ($TAP Presale), because having a clean feed of best crypto presale candidates and upcoming crypto presales in one place saves me stupid amounts of time on research and I honestly treat time as the main cost now, not capital.

Not financial advice—DYOR. 🔍”