Airdrop claim: at Meteora every entitlement below 10 MET lapses on October 21

Anyone who provided liquidity to the pools of the Solana trading platform Meteora between July 1, 2025 and June 30, 2026 has to claim by October 21, 2026. After that the share is gone, and gone for good: according to the project's announcement, whatever is left behind passes to the remaining eligible participants. The window has been open since July 21, and five days are left.

An airdrop claim is not a button press that always works. It hangs on two thresholds, on a list of eligible pools and on a wallet approval that costs the entire balance at the wrong address. This piece works through the points in order, with Meteora as the running example, and ends on the question that is almost always forgotten in Germany: how much of this lands in the tax return?

What happens to the Meteora airdrop on October 21

Meteora is a trading platform on the Solana blockchain where users deposit liquidity into pools and earn from the trading fees. For the second round of this programme, known internally as LP Stimulus Season 2, the project set aside 20 million MET from its ecosystem reserve. That is around two percent of the entire token supply and, at the price of October 16, a good $7.2 million.

Distribution follows a simple principle: your share is your points total divided by the sum of all points, multiplied by those two percent of supply. Points were awarded for one thing only, namely the fees your position actually generated. How much capital you had deposited no longer mattered in this round; in Season 1, locked value still counted.

The news itself, including where it sits in the running airdrop calendar, is in our report on the Meteora claim deadline of October 13. This article is about the mechanics behind it, which look the same at every larger claim.

The two thresholds: 100,000 points and 10 MET

A wallet is eligible only if it clears both hurdles: at least 100,000 points, and the distribution has to produce at least 10 MET. Fall below either and the share is lost entirely; it is distributed to the remaining participants.

The first threshold can be translated into real money, and that makes it tangible. A standard pool paid 1,000 points per one dollar of generated fees. 100,000 points there therefore mean exactly $100 in fee income over twelve months. In a launch pool, which yielded only 200 points per dollar, $500 would have been needed. In the DAMM v2 beta window, which counted double at 2,000 points per dollar, $50 would have been enough.

The second threshold has a quirk that is easily missed. It is stated in tokens, not in euros. On October 16, 10 MET are worth around $3.61, or 3.21 euros. A wallet can therefore clear the points hurdle comfortably and still fail on an amount smaller than a packet of cigarettes. Read the other way: holders who ignored the notification because they expected small change may well be right, though looking costs nothing.

Which pools earned points and which came away empty

This is where most claims fail, not on the deadline. Only fees from DLMM pools and from DAMM v2 counted. Limit orders and DAMM v1 pools earned zero points, no matter how much turnover ran through them. Capital parked in DAMM v1 for a year comes away with nothing.

A second condition applies as well, and it is tighter still: a pool only counted if its quote token was one of five. JupUSD, USDC, USDT, SOL and USD1 were eligible. With any other token on the other side of the pair, the fees generated zero points. The project also applied three exclusion lists one after another: tokens first, then pools, then wallets. Pools with M3M3, LIBRA and MELANIA were thrown out entirely, as were pools that failed the internal quality checks and wallets that security researchers had flagged as fraud addresses.

The pattern repeats at almost every airdrop of this size. A project defines after the fact which activity counted as worth rewarding, and the boundary always falls tighter than participants expected. Reading the terms before being annoyed by a zero is therefore worth the time.

How to check your own claim

At Meteora the route is the same as at most claims on Solana, and it deliberately does not start in a search engine. Open the project's official page via the link in the governance announcement for Season 2, connect the wallet you provided liquidity with at the time, and read off the amount shown. The right address matters: holders spread across several wallets have to connect each one separately, because the count was per address.

One particularity concerns users of management services such as HawkFi: the project assigned their positions to the actual owners, so the claim should land with your own wallet and not with the service provider. If the page shows zero although you were certainly active, the cause is very probably one of the exclusion grounds from the previous section rather than an error.

One more point on the time of day, because it decides money: the project announcement names only the date, no time. A trade publication wrote of 10:00 UTC over the summer, but that figure stands on the publication alone, not on the project. Claiming on the morning of October 21 means relying on a number nobody has confirmed. Get it done before then.

Fake claim pages and the signature as the way in

Every announced claim deadline attracts replicas. The ploy targets not your password but the transaction you approve in the wallet: instead of collecting the airdrop, you sign a permission that gives an outside address access to your tokens. How close that can come to genuine pages became clear in mid-October, when a fake Shiba Inu airdrop carrying a wallet drainer went around.

Three habits lower the risk considerably. Never open the claim page via an advertisement, a direct message or a link in social networks, but via the project page or the official announcement. Read what the wallet says before approving: a claim transaction collects tokens, it does not grant an unlimited spending allowance. And keep larger holdings separate from the address you claim with. A hardware wallet for the holding and a separate address for interaction cost effort once and spare you everything else when it matters.

A genuine airdrop never demands an advance payment, a seed phrase or a fee in stablecoins before you receive anything. Where that is asked for, the matter is settled.

What a lapsed claim is worth today

Is the effort worth it at all? The answer depends on your position, but it can be bounded. MET stands at $0.36 on October 16 and, with a good $201 million in market capitalisation, ranks 186th among the larger crypto assets. The entire pot of 20 million tokens therefore amounts to about $7.2 million, spread across all eligible participants.

Clearing the points threshold only just puts holders in the low double-digit dollars or below. Standing for months in well-running DLMM pools with high fees can put them considerably above that. The sum cannot be worked out across the board, because the denominator, the total of all points, is not public. What is certain: the price has almost halved since the all-time high of $0.69, so the share is worth less than it was when the claim window opened in July.

By way of comparison with other offers in this field: holders who do not intend to sell their tokens anyway should check whether MET can subsequently be held in custody or put to work, a question that often fails on the fees with small amounts rather than on the availability. Which other deadlines are still open is collected in our airdrop overview.

Airdrops and tax: when the tax office takes a cut

In Germany the treatment follows the Federal Ministry of Finance circular of March 6, 2025 on individual questions of the income-tax treatment of crypto assets. The distinction that matters is the one about consideration given in return. Where someone receives tokens entirely without acting, that administrative view generally finds no other service within the meaning of section 22 number 3 of the Income Tax Act. Where they had to do something, by contrast, such as supply data, publish content or render a service, the tokens are recognised at their market value at the moment of receipt.

There is no blanket answer for classifying a liquidity airdrop, and anyone promising one is overstating the position. The allocation here attaches to an activity that itself generated income, namely the fees from the pools. Whether the tax office sees consideration in that is a question of the individual case and belongs with a tax adviser, not in a rule of thumb.

Two figures are worth knowing all the same. For other income under section 22 number 3 of the Income Tax Act, an exemption limit of 256 euros per calendar year applies; once it is exceeded, the entire amount is taxable, not only the portion above it. And on a later sale, the one-year deadline for private disposals applies, counted from receipt. Failing to note the day of receipt and the price on that day means reconstructing both laboriously later; a tax tool with a wallet connection takes that work off your hands.

What the claim costs in fees on Solana

The network fee for a Solana transaction is a fraction of a cent, even with SOL at around $104. The claim therefore does not fail on the price of the transaction. Two other items can arise: for every token a wallet holds for the first time, Solana creates its own token account, and a small amount of SOL is tied up as a deposit for it. That amount is not lost, it comes back when the account is closed, but it has to sit on the address at the time of the claim.

That makes the preparation simple: keep a small SOL balance on the wallet before claiming. An address with zero SOL cannot send the transaction, even where the claim exists. Holders who still have to obtain SOL should reckon with a trading fee plus a withdrawal fee at a crypto exchange, and should not start that on October 20.

Our assessment: the redistribution makes the deadline harder

From the newsroom's point of view, this claim differs from many others in one respect, and to the disadvantage of latecomers. The usual arrangement is that unclaimed tokens fall back to the project treasury. At Meteora they pass to the remaining eligible participants. For those who stayed that is a bonus; for everyone else a final loss with no room for goodwill, because an amount already credited to others cannot be recovered after the fact.

The evidence sits directly in the terms: wallets below 10 MET lose their allocation, and it is distributed to the remaining participants. Against that, the amounts are small for many participants and the effort is out of proportion; against a grace period, a fixed deadline is what makes the distribution possible to close at all. No recommendation to buy or sell MET follows from this: the token has lost considerable ground since its high, and total loss is possible at any time with a project of this size.

What this case shows for the coming months: claim windows are getting shorter and the terms more granular. Regular liquidity providers should keep an eye on pool types and quote tokens before a round begins, not once the distribution is settled.

Airdrop claim: after October 21 only Pharos is left

1. Go through the addresses today. Connect every wallet you provided liquidity with at Meteora and read off the amount. Keep a small SOL balance ready for it; where to get it most cheaply is shown by our comparison of crypto exchanges.
2. Document the receipt straight away. Note the date, the amount and the price on the day it arrives. You need both for the tax return, and a portfolio tracker with a tax function handles it automatically.
3. Put the next date in the diary. After Meteora comes the Pharos claim deadline on October 25, according to our report of October 8. Anyone eligible there is best off keeping the wallet address in a software wallet used for claims only.

(As of October 16, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)