The Most Profitable Crypto Airdrops of the Week: Week 42 and the October 15 Sonic Burn

Updated October 15, 2026: the Sonic deadline falls today — the claim and the burn are set for October 15. The Meteora (October 21) and Pharos (October 25) dates were re-checked at the project sources and are unchanged.

Crypto airdrops in week 42: three October deadlines, the first one today

This week brings the deadline that has been on the calendar since April: Sonic burns roughly 32,690,000 unclaimed S tokens on October 15, 2026, left over from the Season 1 and Season 2 airdrops. That is today, Thursday, October 15, and after it the claim is closed for good.

New this week is a second cut-off that has not appeared in this round-up before: Meteora closes the claim for its LP Stimulus Season 2 on October 21, 2026. The Pharos claim portal follows on October 25. At Grass, by contrast, the window stays open well into next year.

If you are new to the topic: what an airdrop is, how snapshots work and how to spot a dubious offer is covered in our airdrop guide. Some of last week's deadlines have grown into this week, and some are new.

The deadlines at a glance

1. Sonic (S): 32.69 million tokens get burned today

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 are still sitting in the contract and remain claimable; that balance will be burned on October 15, 2026 if it has not been claimed by then. The project does not name a time of day, and there is no grace period.

After the date, any participant can trigger the burn of the remaining balance, which removes the tokens from supply permanently. They do not move to a team wallet or into a new incentive pool — they are gone.

One point for anyone who has been waiting: the early-claim penalties are long over. Season 1 carried a deduction until April 18, 2026, Season 2 until May 24, 2026. From those dates until October 15, 2026 the claim is penalty-free. So there is no reason left to wait — and after the date, no way to catch up.

Claims go through the project's portal at my.soniclabs.com/airdrop. The details are in the Sonic Labs announcement on the burn and the final claim deadline. What to check before you claim is covered in our separate piece on the Sonic claim deadline.

2. Meteora (MET): the Season 2 claim closes on October 21

This is the new entry of the week. Meteora opened the claim for its LP Stimulus Season 2 on July 21, 2026; the window runs until October 21, 2026. The project does not give a time of day in its write-up, nor a timezone; the last day is not a safe buffer.

On offer are 20 million MET, about two percent of total supply, from the Ecosystem Reserve. Eligibility covers liquidity providers who generated fees between July 1, 2025 and June 30, 2026. Only fees from DLMM and DAMM v2 pools count; limit orders and DAMM v1 pools are explicitly excluded.

Two thresholds are worth knowing before you open the portal: you need at least 100,000 points, and the calculated allocation has to come to at least 10 MET. Anyone below that forfeits the allocation, which is redistributed among the remaining eligible wallets. Your share is your points divided by total points, applied to those two percent. If you claim, you can stake the tokens straight into the referral staking program, but you do not have to.

Claims go through the project's campaign page. The conditions, the points formula and both thresholds are set out in Meteora's governance post on LP Stimulus Season 2; the project also announced the cut-off through its official account when claims opened.

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

The Pharos airdrop has been running since April 28, 2026, with a clearly stated duration of 180 days. That puts the last day on October 25, 2026. What happens next is spelled out by the project itself: unclaimed tokens revert to the Pharos Foundation, and the airdrop site is closed.

According to the project, eligibility covers 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 gets their claims consolidated automatically into one.

The project does not name a time of day for October 25, so do not plan for the last day. The conditions and the cut-off are in the FAQ of the Pharos claim portal, and the details of the process are in our piece on the Pharos claim deadline.

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

At Grass this is about the rewards for taking part in the network during Stage 2. Eligibility covers anyone who shared bandwidth across epochs 1 to 19, which 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 stay with the project.

The detail many people miss: the payout comes in USDC, not in GRASS. For you that means you do not receive a project token whose price you have to watch, but a dollar stablecoin — and for tax purposes that is a different event from a token airdrop. The breakdown is in Grass's explanation of the Stage 2 allocation. Because this window stays open three months longer than the three October dates, this is the entry without any rush.

Before you claim: two things that matter this week

Only the real portal. The closer a cut-off gets, the more cloned claim pages appear — Pharos in particular has known look-alikes on similar-sounding domains. Always reach the claim address through the project's official channel, never through a link in a direct message, and check it character by character. If a signature request asks for more than the claim itself, cancel it. How to keep claims and wallets separate is covered in our hardware wallet comparison.

The claim is the moment that matters for tax. Record the time, the token amount and the price at the moment of receipt, and do it immediately — a wallet transaction on its own rarely answers those questions later. Which data to note down is covered in our guide to airdrop tax in Germany.

And afterwards? What happens to a claimed token

A freshly claimed airdrop token is almost always a low-cap token: thin volume, wide spreads, prices that can halve or double within hours. A total loss is a realistic outcome here, not a theoretical one. Doing nothing after the claim is a decision too — and often the calmer one. For an overview of the day's moves, see our crypto prices page.

If you do want to trade tokens like these, you need something other than a charting tool: Dexscreener and TradingView display, they do not let you trade. The mobile app FOMO Family is built for exactly that — discovering, swiping through and trading meme and low-cap tokens directly in the app, with fast deposits. Download the app through the link and get ten percent off your trading fees. There is also community speculation about a possible airdrop for active users; that is unconfirmed, the provider has announced nothing of the kind, and it is not a reason to deposit money.

What does not make the list this week

Four frequently named candidates stay out, because they lack exactly what this format requires: a documented date. OpenSea, MetaMask, Base and Lighter have been traded as likely airdrops for months, but none of these projects has published a snapshot or claim date. “Airdrop confirmed, date open” is not an entry for a deadline list. The registration deadline for the LAPTOP claim at Bitvavo, by contrast, has already passed: it ended on October 10 — the details are in our piece on the LAPTOP claim at Bitvavo.

Disclosure: some of the providers named in this article work with us through affiliate programs. This has no influence on our editorial assessment.

(As of October 15, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Deadlines and participation terms change; check them with the provider before you take part.)