Forks and Airdrops: What They Mean for Holders and What to Do

Most holders encounter airdrops and forks unexpectedly: suddenly a token arrives, or the exchange writes that after the fork there will be two balances. Not everyone knows what to do with this.

Forks

A hard fork is a change in network rules that makes old nodes incompatible with new ones. If the community is split, two networks emerge: the old and the new. Everyone who held the coin before the fork receives a balance on both.

Notable examples include Bitcoin Cash in 2017, Ethereum Classic in 2016, and ETH PoW after The Merge in 2022. For BTC holders at the time of the Bitcoin Cash fork, an equivalent BCH balance appeared; for ETH holders during the switch from PoW, ETHW appeared.

If the crypto was on an exchange, the exchange itself decides whether to support the fork. Some exchanges credit the new branch token, others do not. If the crypto is in your own wallet, you can claim the token via the fork's official wallet, but be careful: phishing sites often create clones.

Airdrops

This is a distribution of tokens to the community — usually as a marketing campaign for a new project or as a reward for early network users (Uniswap, Optimism, Arbitrum, Starknet). You can receive them in several ways:

• Active use of the network. If you ever used Arbitrum, swapped on L2, or bridged through standard services, you might have been included in a snapshot.
• Holding the base token. Some projects airdrop to holders of a related coin (e.g., ATOM holders receive some airdrops in the Cosmos ecosystem).
• Registration via whitelisting. Submitting a form, usually with social requirements: following on Twitter, Discord, and so on.

What NOT to Do

Do not enter your seed phrase into an airdrop form. This is the #1 way to lose your wallet. Real airdrops arrive at your address automatically or require only a signature, not your seed.

Do not trade tokens through a third-party site. Often, a copy of a DEX interface (drainer) is made for the airdrop token, and when you connect your wallet, it grants permission to spend all your tokens. Trade only on official Uniswap/PancakeSwap, and verify the token address via CoinGecko.

Do not panic about taxes. A received airdrop is income at the moment of receipt (in most jurisdictions), but the tax is calculated based on the value at the time of crediting, not the peak. Keep this in mind.