The most profitable crypto airdrops this week - week 43

Crypto airdrops in week 43: two windows close, one exchange shuts down

This is the densest week of the month: Meteora closes the claim for its season 2 LP Stimulus on October 21, 2026, and four days later the Pharos claim portal shuts. Both deadlines fall inside this calendar week, and the same applies to both: planning for the last day is planning tight.

There is also a case this format rarely sees. StandX is not distributing a token of its own but winding the platform down and paying out the remaining proceeds as DUSD. The entitlement is real and the dates are fixed, but the claim itself only opens in November.

If you are new to the subject, what an airdrop is, how snapshots work and how to spot dubious offers are covered in our airdrop guide. Last week's situation was still shaped by the Sonic deadline; that expired on October 15 and appears here only as a footnote.

The dates at a glance

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

This is the next closing date, and it falls in the middle of this week. Meteora opened the claim for its season 2 LP Stimulus on July 21, 2026; the project's governance post gives the period as July 21 to October 21, 2026. No time of day is stated there, and no time zone for the claim window itself. The UTC reference in the post applies to the assessment period. The last day is therefore not a buffer you can rely on.

The distribution covers 20 million MET, around two percent of total supply, from the Ecosystem Reserve. Eligibility covers anyone who earned fees as a liquidity provider on the Solana blockchain between July 1, 2025 and June 30, 2026 (UTC). Only fees from DLMM and DAMM v2 pools count; limit orders and DAMM v1 pools are expressly not eligible.

Two thresholds decide whether anything arrives at all: at least 100,000 points are required, and the calculated allocation must come to at least 10 MET. Fall below either and the entitlement is lost, with the share redistributed among the remaining eligible wallets. What happens to allocations nobody claims by the closing date is not something the project sets out.

The conditions, the points formula and both thresholds are in Meteora's governance post on the LP Stimulus season 2. We have written up the details of the process in a separate piece on the Meteora 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 of 180 days. That gives October 25, 2026 as the last day. What happens afterwards is in the project's FAQ: unclaimed tokens return to the Pharos Foundation, and the airdrop page is closed. Here too the project names neither a time of day nor a time zone.

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 their entitlements combined automatically into a single claim.

The conditions and the closing date are in the FAQ of the Pharos claim portal, and the details of the process in our piece on the Pharos claim deadline.

3. StandX (DUSD): no token, but a payout, and a fixed schedule

This week's new entry is not an ordinary airdrop. StandX, an exchange for perpetual futures, has cancelled its planned token launch and is shutting operations down in stages. Instead of a token of its own, the remaining proceeds will be distributed to users once as DUSD. There is no lock-up attached.

The schedule is dated throughout in the project's announcement. The perpetual contracts move on October 20, 2026 into a mode in which positions can only be reduced. The page for checking your own entitlement opens on October 26, 2026 at 00:00 UTC. Claiming runs from November 1, 2026, 00:00 UTC, to December 31, 2026, 08:00 UTC; whatever nobody claims by then expires. Open positions will be closed at market price on January 15, 2027, and withdrawals and DUSD redemptions end on January 31, 2027.

How much falls to an individual address is something the project has not published, neither a total sum nor a formula. By its own account the inputs are advance deposits, participation in the alpha phase, mainnet trading, market making and referrals, and the project says it will filter out multiple accounts and wash trading. In concrete terms: whether and how much reaches you only shows on the eligibility page on October 26.

All the dates are in StandX's announcement on the payout and wind-down, which the notice banner on the exchange's home page also points to. In the same notice the project makes clear that it never contacts users by direct message and never asks for private keys.

4. Grass (stage 2): until January 22, 2027, and paid out in USDC

With Grass this is about the rewards for taking part in the network in stage 2. Eligibility covers anyone who shared bandwidth in epochs 1 to 19, the period from October 14, 2024 to June 8, 2026. The hard deadline runs to January 22, 2027; rewards that go unclaimed stay with the project.

The point many people read past: the payout is in USDC, not in GRASS. No new GRASS tokens are created, so circulating supply does not change. For you that means you are not receiving 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. Grass sets out the background in its explanation of the stage 2 distribution. Because the window stays open three months longer than the two October deadlines, this is the entry with no urgency.

Before the claim: two points that count this week

Only the genuine portal. The closer a closing date comes, the more cloned claim pages appear. Clones with similar-sounding addresses are known for Pharos, and StandX warns about them expressly in its wind-down notice. 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. A signature asking for more than the claim is one you cancel. How to keep entitlements and wallets apart is shown 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. Unsold airdrops can be taxable too, which catches many people out every year, and our piece on taxing crypto airdrops covers the basics. How an entitlement arises in the first place and when it expires is explained in our piece on claiming airdrops.

And afterwards? What happens to a claimed token

A freshly claimed airdrop token is almost always a low-cap token: thin trading volume, wide spreads, prices that can halve or double within hours. Total loss is a realistic outcome here, not a theoretical one. Doing nothing at all after the claim is also a decision, and often the calmer one.

If you do want to trade tokens like these, you need something other than a charting tool: Dexscreener and TradingView show you prices, they do not let you trade. The mobile app FOMO Family is built for it, with meme and low-cap tokens discovered, swiped through and traded directly in the app, and fast deposits. Download the app through the link and secure ten percent off the trading fees. The community is also speculating about a possible airdrop for active users; that is unconfirmed, there is no announcement from the provider, and it is no reason to deposit money.

What does not make the list this week

Two things are deliberately missing. Sonic (S) is done: the deadline for the season 1 and season 2 airdrops expired on October 15, 2026, around 32,690,000 unclaimed S tokens have been free for burning since then, and there is no grace period. The claim cannot be made up; the details are in our piece on the Sonic claim deadline.

And MINT (MNTD) stays out, even though the token appears in several round-ups with a launch on October 20. The project itself names only a quarter rather than a day, and the statements about the blockchain contradict each other. Missing as before are OpenSea, MetaMask, Base and Lighter: all four have been traded as likely airdrops for months, and none of these projects has published a snapshot or claim date. "Airdrop confirmed, date open" is not an entry for a deadline list.

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 19, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Deadlines and participation terms change; check them with the provider before taking part.)