Free Money! How Experimenting With Ethereum DApps Got Me $15,000 For Free, While Others Got $84,000

Being an early crypto adopter has its perks. In this case, the perk was a free handout by a decentralized autonomous organization that is worth about $15,000.

What Happened: When I bought my first — and only — Ethereum Name Service ENS/USD domain, my only reason to do it was "why not?" but then the team behind the service decided to run an airdrop, and I was lucky enough to receive nearly 200 ENS for free.

CoinMarketCap data shows that those tokens reached their all-time high of $84 earlier this week, so the DAO gifted me about $16,800 at the time.

Of course, I am no magician so I did not sell them at their highest, but they were still worth over $13,000 when I sold them — which is definitely not bad when you're selling something that you never bought. Still, I am far from being among the luckiest receivers of this airdrop.

Airdrops of about 200 ENS are the lowest ones, with the highest being of about 1,000 ENS — which at the all-time high prices was equivalent to about $84,000. The number of tokens that each qualified user receives is based on a calculation taking into account how long the address held onto a domain and for how long the domain was registered.

Claiming the tokens requires the holder of the address to participate in the DAO's governance by voting on some proposal and then delegating his voting powers to another address. The user can also delegate the voting power to himself if he prefers to keep voting over decisions determining the future of the Ethereum Name Service on his own.

ENS Price Action: As of press time, Ethereum Name Service's token is trading at $56.86.