The Aster Stage 4 Airdrop, also called the "Harvest" stage, went live on November 17, 2025, distributing roughly 120 million ASTER tokens, about 1.5% of total supply, across six weekly Epochs. It launched alongside a separate $10 million "Double Harvest" trading competition, letting the same trading activity earn rewards from both programs simultaneously.
How the Aster Stage 4 Airdrop Is Structured
Following what Aster described as strong performance from its earlier Stage 3 program, Stage 4 allocates approximately 120,000,000 ASTER tokens, representing 1.5% of the token's total supply, spread evenly across six weekly Epochs. Rewards are tied to trading activity on both the Perpetual and Spot markets, meaning the program is designed to reward consistent, ongoing participation rather than a single large trade.
The $10 Million Double Harvest Trading Competition
Running concurrently with the airdrop, the Double Harvest competition launched on November 17, 2025 with a total reward pool of $10 million, structured across five independent weekly leaderboards. Because the competition runs alongside the Stage 4 airdrop rather than replacing it, users can earn both airdrop rewards and separate competition rewards from identical trading behavior, effectively stacking incentives on the same trades. Reporting on the competition indicated top-performing weekly traders could earn as much as $300,000 in a single week, with an ideal five-week run potentially yielding up to $1.5 million.
Rocket Launch: A Parallel Growth Engine
Alongside the airdrop and trading competition, Aster continued scaling Rocket Launch, its early-asset product designed to accelerate liquidity for new token campaigns. Within its first month, Rocket Launch supported five new token campaigns with a combined reward pool exceeding $3 million, which Aster pointed to as evidence of strong market demand for early-stage liquidity and token launch mechanisms on its platform.
Context: Infrastructure Development Alongside Incentives
During the period surrounding the Stage 4 rollout, the Aster team also discussed active development of a high-performance, optionally private on-chain order-book Layer 1, the infrastructure that would later become Aster Chain. Running major token incentive programs alongside public infrastructure development is a pattern common among perpetual exchanges building toward their own base layer, using trading activity to bootstrap liquidity ahead of a full migration.
The Stage 4 program preceded Aster's broader rollout of protected trading tools like Shield Mode, part of the same growth push that eventually culminated in the Aster Chain mainnet launch.
A comparable case unfolds in Deribit SignalPlus Trading Competition: $450K Up for Grabs, worth reading alongside this coverage for the broader context.
The same underlying theme surfaces in What Is a Crypto Airdrop and How Do You Qualify, illustrating how this pattern isn't isolated to a single project.
Glossary
- Airdrop: A distribution of free tokens to users, typically based on activity or eligibility criteria set by the project.
- Epoch: A defined time period, in this case weekly, over which a portion of airdrop rewards is calculated and distributed.
- Token supply: The total number of tokens that exist or will ever exist for a given cryptocurrency, used to calculate what percentage an airdrop represents.
- Leaderboard competition: A ranked trading contest where rewards are distributed based on relative performance against other participants over a set period.
Disclaimer
Read this as informational content only; it does not constitute financial or investment advice. Airdrop eligibility, reward pools, and competition terms are subject to change; confirm current details directly through official Aster announcements before participating.
