A lockdrop is a modified version of an airdrop used for distributing newly minted coins among participants. It involves locking up cryptocurrency in a smart contract in order to receive new coins. The concept of the lockdrop was introduced by Commonwealth Labs in late 2018 with the announcement of the Edgeware lockdrop. In order to receive EDG coins, participants were required to lock up ETH in a personalized smart contract. They also had the option to simply signal their address for a snapshot, but for a much smaller allocation. The primary purpose of the lockdrop was to bootstrap a community from the greater cryptocurrency community by enticing longterm ETH holders to participate. It also involves some sacrifice on the part of the participant, who must put in some effort to receive their coins and also give up liquidity of their ETH for a specific period of time. The Edgeware lockdrop began on June 1st, 2019 at 00:00 UTC and ended August 31st, 2019 at 23:59 UTC. It resulted in 1,199,728 ETH locked up and 4,346,544 ETH signaled.
Since the Edgeware lockdrop, other cryptocurrency projects such as Supernova have considered the use of lockdrops to bootstrap their communities. Supernova intends to allocate coins to Edgeware lockdrop participants, but will also allow additional ETH and BTC lockups, as well as distributing coins to ATOM holders who have their coins bonded to validating nodes.
