On the 16th of January 2023, UniSwap a decentralized exchange went on Twitter to announce a $15.26 or .01E gas rebate.
As promised, the gas on your first NFT purchase was on us 🎁
We wanted to make it as easy as possible for you get your 💰 back, so we airdropped .01E to everyone that purchased an NFT on Uniswap from Nov 30-Dec 14.
Go check your wallets 😉 Thanks for being early!
— Uniswap Labs 🦄 (@Uniswap) January 16, 2023
The platform had previously promised to cover the gas cost of the first 22k addresses to purchase NFTs on their recently launched NFT aggregate.
UniSwap’s NFT aggregate is not a marketplace, but a platform that gathers listings and prices from multiple NFT marketplaces like Opensea, and presents them for UniSwap users to purchase. Thus, their users have access to more listings and better prices in one place.
Fortunately, UniSwap kept its gas rebate promise. The aim was to make it easier for NFT investors to recoup their capital back by reducing the cost of their first transaction with UniSwap. So they airdropped .01E to the first couple thousand users that purchased an NFT from November till the 14th of December, as a form of appreciation for being early birds.
The gas rebate would be claimable through the UniSwap platform on the 16th of January 2023, and it would be viable for one year. Full and partial transactions would be considered for the rebate but failed attempts to purchase wouldn’t be eligible.
The gas rebate was capped at .01E, thus users who spent less than that on gas fees would be refunded the amount they spent, and for those who spent more than that, their rebate would be capped at .01E.
Added to that they would also airdrop approximately $5 million worth of USDC to historic Genie users. Aside from showing appreciation, the airdrop is aimed at building an interoperable experience between NFTs and the ERC-20 ecosystem.
Since both NFTs and ERC-20 tokens are the basic elements for the growth of the crypto space, launching NFTs on a Decentralized exchange would facilitate faster indexing, safu smart contracts, and better execution.
Yet, the airdrops aren’t a surprise to UNI users. In 2020, UniSwap released a round of airdrops for users that used the platform before a particular date. People who used UniSwap were eligible for 400 UNI tokens which at the time was worth $2.
Even though the token is now worth $6.6 at the time of writing, it has an all-time high of $44. Thus, users who held on to their tokens and sold then, would have made a “free profit” of $17.6k.
This prompted other rival exchanges to follow suit, and launch their own rounds of airdrops.
