How can a user create an ATA in phantom wallet before owning the actual token?

Question

So, I have a list of 20k+ whitelisted people for a project, and am trying to find a way to airdrop it without significant cost. As i understand, the biggest cost of the actual airdrop is opening ATA for all the users, is there a way for users to open it themselves in phantom wallet so they can claim my token via a tg faucet i developed without me paying for the ATA fee? Or does anyone have any other solutions to this, most bulk senders quote me around 100+ SOL for the transaction/ATA rent fees.

Thanks!

Answer 1

There's definitely a way for people to claim the airdrop themselves!

You can write an on-chain program that holds onto a bag of your tokens. The on-chain program receives a list of the 20k people from the project, along with the bag. If the person's pubkey is on the list, and the account is owned by them, your program transfers into the ATA and then ticks them off the list.

In that situation, anyone can claim the tokens for someone, which might be even better.

100 SOL is pretty expensive, but I'm guessing the bulk senders add a markup. At 0.002 SOL per account, it should be 40 SOL for 20k accounts.