Distributing tokens to people who already showed up
An airdrop takes a different approach entirely: instead of selling tokens, the project gives them away for free to some existing population, typically people who already used a related product or protocol before the token existed. The logic is that these are the people most likely to have genuine interest in the project's success, since they engaged with it before there was any financial incentive to do so. Rewarding that prior behavior aims to seed the token's holder base with people who are already invested in the ecosystem in a non-financial sense, and who are more likely to remain active participants afterward rather than sellers looking for a quick exit.
Airdrops also sidestep the speed and capital problems of sales entirely: there's no transaction race to win and no price to pay, so the mechanism doesn't inherently favor the fastest or wealthiest participants the way a fixed-price sale does. Eligibility is instead determined by some record of past activity, decided in advance and usually verified against on-chain history, which shifts the competition from 'who can act fastest today' to 'who genuinely participated in the past,' a much better proxy for who a project actually wants holding its token.