Year 2024 feels like the year of crypto airdrops. It has only been 5 days into the new year and we have seen four major airdrop announcements and maybe handful more being hinted.

One of the big ones that have confirmed their airdrops is SAGA Protocol. The new year came with the airdrop announcement and mainnet drawing closer and closer. Before we dive into the airdrop details, we will learn about SAGA and how it innovates in the crypto space.

What is SAGA Protocol?

Saga is a Layer 1 protocol that allows developers to automatically spin up parallelized and interoperable dedicated chains that elastically scale with their Web3 application needs.

This is what SAGA claims itself to be–a layer 1 blockchain that enables builders to easily create sovereign chains to host their decentralized applications (dApps). These chains, although sovereign, can easily communicate with the layer 1 and among these different chains. This is what we call interoperability of blockchains.

The more users that are being onboarded onchain, the faster it has to be, cheaper, and secure. This is where the modular blockchain thesis comes into play. Separating the application layer (chains, in this case) from the settlement layer (layer 1) is crucial in the blockchain space in the future.

Smart contract developers are empowered by the SAGA Protocol to build a separate chain on SAGA very easily. This takes away the serious technical know-how required to launch a chain. Since new chains launching on SAGA can be secured by the layer 1 security provider (Pegasus), they don’t need to worry about security of the chain as well.

SAGA is positioning itself as the Multiverse of chains that will onboard the next millions of users on to the chain, especially in the space of blockchain games.

GameFi and Real World Assets (RWA) are two of the biggest narratives of the next cryptocurrency bull market. RWA bridges the gap between assets in traditional finance to its tokenized form on the blockchain. GameFi looks to attract the next generation of gamers onto the chain with fun and rewarding games.

SAGA is already home to several hundreds of applications ranging from web infrastructure, NFT projects, gaming, DeFi, and social spaces. Majority of the projects are gaming.

If you want to keep an eye out for one of the biggest narratives for the next bull market, SAGA might be a key player in the GameFi space.

SAGA Airdrop Eligibility Criteria

SAGA announced its genesis token ($SAGA) airdrop in an article published on January 4, 2024. Throughout the evolution of airdrops in crypto, there have been some very good eligibility criteria to filter out sybils, and reward active users. SAGA genesis airdrop took it one step further.

Valuing Loyalty — this is a hard metric to quantify and fit into an airdrop eligibility criteria model. SAGA found a way to do this. The snapshots for the airdrop were taken throughout 2023, while the crypto bros were going through one of the toughest bear markets out there. So, it was deemed necessary to reward the users who held on to their tokens or even increased their bags.

SAGA genesis airdrop gives an airdrop multiplier to people who increased their staked token number from the start of the snapshot date to the end of the snapshot date.

Increasing the token count can happen in two ways–1) buy more tokens and stake them, 2) claim staking rewards and re-stake them. Both methods would have qualified you for a loyalty bonus in the $SAGA airdrop.

Below are the communities eligible for the $SAGA genesis airdrop and the criteria used for qualification.

(1) Cosmos Hub ($ATOM)

• Snapshots on April 20, 2023 and October 20, 2023
• Staked amount should have been greater than 0 $ATOM at April 20, and increased to over 25 $ATOM by October 20
• Essentially minimum stake should be 25 $ATOM as of October 20, and staked tokens need to have increased from April 20th to October 20th
• Three groups of stakers;
  • 25 – 64 $ATOM – Small
  • 64 – 188 $ATOM – Medium
  • 188 $ATOM and above – Large
  • Each higher tier receives 5x more airdrop tokens than the immediate lower tier (Eg: Medium group will receive 5x more tokens than Small group)
• Loyalty bonus – if staked $ATOM at snapshot end is 30% higher than the staked $ATOM at the beginning of the snapshots.

(2) Celestia Community ($TIA)

• Snapshots on November 07, 2023 and December 01, 2023
• Staked amount on December 1st should be greater than 23 $TIA
• Three groups of stakers;
  • 23 – 99 $TIA – Small
  • 99 – 204 $TIA – Medium
  • 204 and above $TIA – Large
  • Each higher tier receives 5x more airdrop tokens than the immediate lower tier (Eg: Medium group will receive 5x more tokens than Small group)
• Loyalty bonus – if staked $TIA at the end of snapshot dates is higher than the beginning snapshot date

(3) Polygon Community ($MATIC)

• Snapshots on April 20, 2023 and October 20, 2023
• Staked amount on October 20th should be greater than 300 $MATIC, or bridged more than 0.4 $ETH via Polygon zkEVM bridge
• Three groups of stakers and bridge users;
  • 300 – 1116 $MATIC staked or 0.4 – 0.643 $ETH bridged – Small
  • 1116 – 5134 $MATIC staked or 0.643 – 1.11 $ETH bridged – Medium
  • 5134+ $MATIC staked or 1.11+ $ETH bridged – Large
  • Each higher tier receives 5x more airdrop tokens than the immediate lower tier (Eg: Medium group will receive 5x more tokens than Small group)
• Loyalty bonus – staked amount at the end of snapshot date higher than beginning snapshot date, and staked amount at beginning snapshot date be higher than 0

(4) Avalanche Community (AVAX)

• Snapshots on April 20, 2023 and October 20, 2023
• Staked any amount greater than 0 $AVAX at beginning snapshot date and more than 25 $AVAX at ending snapshot date
• Three groups of stakers;
  • 25 – 44 $AVAX – Small
  • 44 – 172 $AVAX – Medium
  • 172 $AVAX and above – Large
  • Each higher tier receives 5x more airdrop tokens than the immediate lower tier (Eg: Medium group will receive 5x more tokens than Small group)
• Loyalty bonus – if staked $ATOM for more than 150 days

Did you qualify for the $SAGA airdrop based on above criteria?

Many people did qualify; Cosmos Community 101,000+ wallets, Celestia 27,000+ wallets, Polygon 26,000+ wallets, and Avalanche 26,000+ community.

Eligibility checker or claiming is NOT live yet. Don’t fall for scam links.

Is this the end of the $SAGA airdrop? No.

SAGA Protocol is set to incentivize the participants of their ecosystem as well. This is Play-To-Airdrop, they call it.

From January to February 2024, SAGA will run the campaign ‘The Three Kingdoms’ to encourage users to play games on their blockchain. Participants will be rewarded with $SAGA tokens. Stay tuned with SAGA social media accounts for more information.

SAGA Innovators Airdrop

SAGA Protocol did not forget their early developers in consideration for its airdrop as well. The teams who launched their projects on SAGA testnet are called ‘SAGA Innovators.’ They essentially helped test the platform, chains, interoperability, speed, security, and scalability among other things. Check out the full eligibility criteria for SAGA Innovator airdrop here.

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Disclosure: Cryptocurrency and all its related components are inherently risky and unregulated. There is a very likely possibility that all your investments go to zero. Exercise caution when investing, do your due diligence, and only invest what you can afford to lose completely.