The industry before the launch
Airdrop farming is organized work: wallets multiplied, tasks completed, volume simulated across every protocol rumored to drop a token. By launch day the recipient set is heavy with participants whose cost basis is effort, not conviction — supply that behaves like an unlock that all vests at once.
Predictable early tape
The signature follows: heavy distribution into the first liquid days, rallies sold into by accounts that were always leaving, and a float that only later settles into holders who chose it — the dynamic inherited floats show, compressed and adversarial. Reading a farmed launch’s first quarter as demand discovery misreads a scheduled exit as a market opinion.
The countermeasures shape distributions now
Issuers push back — sybil filters, activity weighting, lockups, the adversarial curation LayerZero made famous — so each launch’s float quality now varies with how seriously the filter was run. Distribution design has become part of a token’s fundamentals, knowable before it trades.
Reading it
Before trading any fresh drop: who got it, what filtering ran, what is locked. The funding read works from day one, but interpret early extremes against the farmers’ exit schedule, not against a settled crowd.