The Most Profitable Crypto Airdrops of the Week: Week 41 and the October 15 Sonic Burn

Crypto airdrops in week 41: the deadlines running right now

This week brings a hard line in the calendar: on October 15, 2026, Sonic burns around 32,690,000 unclaimed S tokens from the Season 1 and Season 2 airdrops. Anyone who has not claimed by then gets nothing — no grace period is provided. Ten days remain.

A second date with a fixed end: the claim portal for the Pharos airdrop closes on October 25, 2026. And at Grass the window for the Stage 2 rewards runs until January 22, 2027 — payment there is in USDC, not in GRASS. The deadlines from last week have therefore partly expired and partly carried over into the new week.

If you are new to the subject: what an airdrop is, how snapshots work and how to spot a dubious offer is set out in our airdrop guide.

The dates at a glance

1. Sonic (S): ten days until 32.69 million tokens are burned

Sonic Labs has set a final cut-off for the Season 1 and Season 2 airdrops. According to the project, around 32,690,000 S across both seasons have gone unclaimed; those tokens will be burned on October 15, 2026. The project names no time of day — after the date the burn can be triggered at any moment, without further notice.

Important for anyone who has hesitated so far: the penalty deductions that applied to early claims at the start are over. Season 1 carried a deduction until April 18, 2026, Season 2 until May 24, 2026. Since then, and up to October 15, 2026, the claim is possible without any deduction. So there is no reason left to wait — and after the date, no way to catch up.

Claims are made in the project's portal at my.soniclabs.com/airdrop. All the details are in the Sonic Labs announcement on the burn and the final claim deadline.

2. Pharos (PROS): the claim portal closes on October 25

The Pharos airdrop has been running since April 28, 2026, with a clearly stated duration: 180 days. That gives October 25, 2026 as the last day. What happens afterwards is written down by the project itself — unclaimed tokens return to the Pharos Foundation, and the airdrop page is closed.

This is the rare case of a date where both ends are documented: the start and the finish. Eligible, according to the project, are testnet participants, contributors to the “Stake Before the Stake” campaign, holders of certain Discord roles and users of the OKX wallet campaign. Anyone eligible across several categories has the entitlements combined automatically into a single claim.

The conditions and the closing date are set out in the FAQ of the Pharos claim portal. The project names no time of day for October 25; do not plan for the last day.

3. Grass (Stage 2): until January 22, 2027 — and the payout comes in USDC

At Grass this concerns the rewards for taking part in the network in Stage 2. Anyone who shared bandwidth in epochs 1 to 19 is taken into account — that is the period from October 14, 2024 to June 8, 2026. The claim has been open since July 22, 2026, and the hard deadline runs until January 22, 2027. After that, unclaimed rewards are retained.

The point many readers skip: the payout is in USDC, not in GRASS. The Grass Foundation puts that down to regulatory uncertainty in the eligible countries. For you it means you do not receive a project token whose price you have to watch, but a dollar stablecoin — for tax purposes that is a different event from a token airdrop, more on which below.

Checking and claiming run exclusively through the project's official dashboard; the explanation of the Stage 2 distribution is in the Grass blog. Grass states itself: the project does not contact you by direct message first, never asks for a seed phrase or private keys, and runs no check through third-party sites.

Not included — and why

This section is the more important part of the research. The following candidates were checked this week and deliberately left out:

• LAPTOP at Bitvavo, registration deadline October 10, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. CEST — the date falls in the middle of this week, and we have covered it in detail. It still appears only in the exchange's help section and in the banner of your own account, not on a publicly verifiable project page: laptopcoin.com has been a domain sales page for weeks. That is why the entry stays out of the table. Anyone who sees an invitation in their account will find the details in our piece on the LAPTOP claim at Bitvavo; what binds are the exchange's own terms.
• CZR Genesis airdrop — the campaign deadline of September 30 doing the rounds has passed, and the notice from CZR Fndn Ltd. never carried an airdrop date at any point. In any case another sentence from it is decisive: the token is not available to persons resident or habitually located in the European Union. An offer that, on the provider's own terms, is not open to our readers does not belong on this list.
• Aster Phase 2 with “claim from October 14” — the statement is correct, only for 2025. The checking portal opened on October 10 and the claim on October 14, both in the previous year. The candidate keeps circulating and remains wrongly dated.
• GRVT — the tranches continue, 30 days per tranche. The project still publishes no date for the next unlock; it appears only in your own account. No documented date, no entry.
• Plume (Season 2) and dappOS (DOS) — claims still open, but with no published end date. We do not invent one and we do not round one.
• ETHGas (GWEI) — the snapshot and claim dates being shared anew date from January 2026. No running deadline.

Also not on this list are the conversion and realisation deadlines that exchanges are currently setting for individual tokens, for instance with SWEAT or ICX. Those are forced conversions on a delisting, not airdrops — even if both show up in the calendar as a deadline.

What to watch on every claim

The deadlines are one part, the route to them the other. Three things that cost money every week:

• Only the project's own address, never a link from a message. Open the claim portal via the official project page and, in case of doubt, type the address by hand. Fake claim pages are the most common route by which airdrop hunting ends in an empty wallet.
• No seed phrase, no private keys, no blanket approval. A claim needs a signature, never your recovery words. Anyone asking for them wants your wallet. For larger holdings it is worth separating the claim wallet from storage; our hardware wallet comparison sorts the devices.
• Budget for fees in advance. The claim itself is usually free, the transaction is not. With small allocations the network fee can exceed the value received — do the arithmetic before you sign.

And then? The token sits in the wallet

With the claim the real decision only begins: hold, swap or sell. With freshly distributed tokens from small market capitalisations that is no academic question, because prices often move violently in the first few days. Where the tokens stand you can see in our crypto prices.

Anyone who wants not merely to watch such tokens but to trade them straight from a phone needs something other than a charting tool: Dexscreener and TradingView display, they do not let you trade. The app FOMO Family is built for that — discover meme and low-cap tokens in the app, swipe through them and trade directly, with fast deposits. Download the app through the link and secure ten percent off trading fees. That trading becomes easier does not make it safer: meme and low-cap tokens are highly volatile, a total loss is possible at any time, and you should stake only what you can afford to lose entirely.

Think about tax straight away

An airdrop is not a tax-free gift in Germany merely because it cost nothing. What governs is still the Federal Ministry of Finance letter of March 6, 2025. What matters is that you record the time, the quantity and the market value at the moment of receipt — later it is barely possible to reconstruct. Which data you should secure immediately is set out point by point in our piece on the records to save as soon as an airdrop arrives.

And the most common error alongside it: the fact that you have sold nothing does not mean there is nothing to declare. Why unsold airdrops can be taxable too is something we explain there.

One note on the state of play, so you file it correctly: on September 25, 2026 the Federal Ministry of Finance presented a draft bill that would bring exchange cryptocurrencies under withholding tax and abolish the one-year holding period for newly acquired holdings — envisaged for acquisitions from January 1, 2027. That is a draft, not applicable law, and it does not address airdrops specifically. For everything you claim this week, the existing legal position applies.

Conclusion

Week 41 has one date that really presses: after October 15, 32.69 million S tokens from the Sonic airdrops are gone for good, and claiming without deduction has been possible for months. Pharos gives you ten more days, Grass months. Everything else circulating as an airdrop this week does not stand up to a check at the project source — and a date that exists only in reports about the date is not a documented date.

Disclosure: some of the providers named in this article work with us through partner programmes. That has no influence on the editorial assessment.

(As of October 5, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Deadlines and terms of participation change; check them with the provider before taking part.)