What is OpenDAO (SOS) crypto coin? The full story behind the NFT airdrop that faded

OpenDAO (SOS) wasn’t built to be the next Bitcoin. It wasn’t even meant to be the next ApeCoin. It started as a simple idea: reward people who traded NFTs on OpenSea. On Christmas Day 2021, anyone who had bought, sold, or traded an NFT on OpenSea got a free slice of 100 trillion SOS tokens. No sign-up. No fees. Just a digital thank-you note written in code. At first, it felt like winning the lottery. The price spiked over 1,200% in days. But that hype didn’t last. Today, SOS is barely trading. Most people who claimed it don’t know what to do with it. And no one’s building anything new around it.

How OpenDAO (SOS) was born

OpenDAO launched on December 25, 2021, as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. It had no team, no CEO, no whitepaper with fancy charts. Just a Medium post announcing an airdrop to OpenSea users. If you’d traded even one NFT on OpenSea before December 1, 2021, you were eligible. The more you traded, the more SOS you got. Over 189,000 wallets claimed tokens before the deadline on June 30, 2022. That’s one of the widest distributions ever for a crypto project.

The token supply was fixed at 100 trillion SOS. Half went to users. Twenty percent was locked for staking rewards. Another 20% went into the DAO treasury - meant to fund NFT artists, compensate scam victims, and support developers. The last 10% was for liquidity pools on Uniswap. No burning. No inflation. No hidden rules. It looked fair. Too fair, some would say later.

What SOS was supposed to do

The project called itself "the token of the metaverse." That sounds big. But in practice, it meant nothing concrete. Unlike ApeCoin, which powers the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem, or LooksRare, which rewards traders on its own marketplace, SOS had no required use. You didn’t need SOS to buy NFTs. You couldn’t vote on platform changes. You couldn’t earn fees or staking rewards in any meaningful way. The only real promise was: "We’ll use the treasury to help the community. Maybe. Someday."

That’s the problem. Most successful crypto projects tie their token to real utility. SOS didn’t. It was a gift with no instructions. People bought it hoping it would become useful. But no one built the tools to make it useful. No apps. No integrations. No roadmap updates after mid-2022. The treasury sat untouched. The developers vanished. The Telegram group became a graveyard of unanswered questions.

Why SOS lost its value

By November 2023, SOS was trading at around $0.00000215. That’s down over 99.9% from its peak. The market cap hovered around $200,000 - less than the cost of a single Bored Ape NFT. Daily trading volume? Often under $100. On some days, it was $0. You couldn’t sell even a small amount without crashing the price.

Why? Because no one wanted it. Not really. People claimed it because it was free. But once the excitement faded, they realized: what now? You can’t pay for anything with SOS. You can’t stake it for yield. You can’t use it in any app. It’s not even listed on major exchanges like Binance or Coinbase. Only Uniswap, and even there, liquidity is so thin that swapping SOS is risky.

Experts called it a "solution in search of a problem." One analyst, Alex Thorn from Galaxy Digital, put it bluntly: "Without mandatory usage, you’re just holding digital confetti." The tokenomics were flawed. Giving away 50 trillion tokens for free doesn’t create demand - it floods the market. And without a way to burn tokens or create scarcity, the price had nowhere to go but down.

Who still holds SOS?

Most holders are either:

• People who claimed it in 2021 and forgot about it
• Speculators who bought cheap after the crash, hoping for a miracle
• Collectors who see it as a historical artifact - like a digital relic from the NFT boom

Reddit’s r/opendao has about 1,800 members. Most posts are questions like: "Can I still claim SOS?" (No.) or "Is there any way to sell this?" (Not easily.) One user wrote: "I claimed 500 billion SOS. I checked the price last month. It’s worth less than a coffee. I’m not even mad anymore. Just confused."

On the other side, a small group still believes. One Telegram user said: "I’m holding because someone will build something with it. 100 trillion tokens is a lot - but the distribution is perfect. If someone wakes up and makes a real DAO out of this, it could explode."

But no one has. Not in over 18 months. No code commits. No announcements. No new team members. Nansen, a blockchain analytics firm, labeled OpenDAO as "dormant."

How it compares to other NFT tokens

OpenDAO sits alone in a strange category. It’s not a marketplace token like LooksRare. It’s not a community token like ApeCoin. It’s not a governance token like UNI or MKR. It’s just… SOS.

Here’s how it stacks up:

OpenDAO has no features. No revenue. No users actively using it. The others? They have real products. Real teams. Real demand. SOS is the only one that didn’t follow through.

Can you still claim SOS?

No. The claim period ended on June 30, 2022. Any unclaimed tokens went into the DAO treasury. There’s no way to get more now. If you didn’t claim it back then, you can’t get it. You can only buy it on Uniswap - if you’re willing to risk slippage and zero liquidity.

Is OpenDAO (SOS) worth anything today?

As an investment? Almost certainly not. It has no utility, no liquidity, no development, and no future roadmap. It’s not a scam - it was never meant to be one. But it’s not a project either. It’s a ghost.

As a piece of crypto history? Maybe. SOS is one of the largest airdrops ever. It was a moment - a wild, hopeful, chaotic moment - when people believed the NFT world could be community-owned. It didn’t work out. But it happened. And that’s worth remembering.

If you hold SOS today, you’re not holding a currency. You’re holding a memory. And maybe, just maybe, a lesson: free tokens don’t create value. Real utility does.