Three years ago on a summer night in Shenzhen, Old Zhang knocked on my door at three in the morning, his eyes shining: 'There’s this thing called airdrop, register and you get money!' We fiddled around in the moldy corridor for half a day, and when we each found 200 unfamiliar tokens in our wallets, our hands were shaking—worth four hundred dollars.
That was the wild era of airdrops. Old Zhang made a detailed Excel sheet to track the project, while I specialized in technical details. That autumn, the 'Starlink' project required the testnet to complete ten transactions, but due to high gas fees, almost no one was interested. I stayed up all night studying the code and found a vulnerability. We borrowed five computers to run the script for seventy-two hours. By dawn, eight thousand tokens were credited, and Old Zhang squatted on the ground crying: 'I can go back home and build a house.'
We fell into madness. I became the author of the 'On-Chain Hunter' tutorial, and Lao Zhang built a community of fifty people. Having experienced projects running away, tokens going to zero, I also tasted the ecstasy of turning twenty times overnight. Lao Zhang really returned home to build a three-story building, laughing in the video with a face full of wrinkles: 'This is all given by the virtual world.'
The turning point was last March. Robots dominated the market, and the rules became so complex that it required holding NFTs and completing social tasks. For the last project, we invested three months, but the project team raised the threshold five times before the distribution. Lao Zhang's voice was hoarse on the phone: 'I can't hold on anymore.' He disbanded the community and opened a small supermarket in the county seat, 'Now I feel at ease.'
I stayed, but no longer chase hot topics. Until I studied the white paper of XPL — its triple mechanism showed me another side of the industry: deflation destruction creates scarcity, liquidity pools maintain stability, and staking governance allows token holders to become builders. The project team invited me to participate in governance, voting and discussing proposals every week.
Last week, Lao Zhang came to Shenzhen to restock, and he had a scar from moving goods on his hand. 'Still doing that virtual stuff?'
I pushed the XPL governance page over: 'Now we are building, not gambling.'
He was silent for a long time: 'I still keep that Excel sheet.'
We looked at each other and smiled. The tide of the times washes over everyone; the golden age of airdrops may have passed, but the value game has just begun. Lao Zhang's truck disappeared into the night, and I looked up to see a few stars — in this intertwined era of reality and illusion, being able to see the distant light while not forgetting the path beneath our feet may be the best state.
