You will understand the strangest labor market in crypto: people working unpaid for protocols that owe them nothing, and protocols designing hope itself as a budget line.
You have probably seen the screenshots: someone opens a wallet and finds free money waiting. The founding legend is real. In September 2020, Uniswap handed 400 UNI to every wallet that had ever used it. Unannounced, unasked for, and worth real money.
Function first, then the name. A token handout granted backwards in time, to past users, as a thank you: a retro airdrop. That single gesture reset the industry's expectations forever. This lesson is about the strange economy it created.
Picture it as a restaurant that one day paid every customer who had ever eaten there. It happened once, famously. What does the city do with that information? It starts eating at every new restaurant, just in case, and it keeps the receipts.
Function first: using a product not for the product, but for the reward it might one day hand its past users. The name: farming. If protocols reward past use, rational people manufacture past use, everywhere a token might appear.
Protocols saw the farmers coming and formalized the game. They publish scoreboards now: do things, earn points. The points buy nothing, convert to nothing, and promise nothing. Every document says so, carefully. What they imply is different: a future drop, sized by your score.
So who is paying? Nobody, yet: that is the design. Users pay effort and gas today for a maybe. The protocol buys growth with equity it has not issued and may never issue. Hope itself, run as a budget line. Place your bet on why this works.