Starknet announced the details of its upcoming STRK token airdrop on Feb 14, 2024, but not everyone was happy with the news.
The airdrop, which will distribute 900 million STRK tokens (9% of total STRK supply) to nearly 1.3 million wallets, has been met with criticism and backlash from some crypto users who felt excluded or disadvantaged by the distribution plan.
One of the main sources of discontent was the eligibility criteria for the airdrop, which filtered out the majority of users who had interacted with Starknet and StarkEx before November 15, 2023 snapshot.
Users who had used other layer-2 solutions, such as Optimism, Arbitrum, or ZKSync, were not eligible, even if they had contributed to the Ethereum ecosystem in other ways.
Billions of STRK Tokens to Flood the Market in April
Another point of contention was the unlocking schedule for the core contributors and investors of Starknet, who will receive 13.1% of the total STRK supply.
These tokens will be unlocked for transfer and sale on April 15, 2024, less than two months after the airdrop launch (TGE) on Feb 20, 2024.
Some users fear that this could lead to a massive sell-off and price dump, as well as a lack of long-term commitment from the team and investors.
Starknet’s co-founder and CEO, Eli Ben-Sasson, defended the airdrop plan in an interview with Decrypt, saying that it was designed to reward the early adopters and supporters of Starknet and to incentivize participation and governance in the network.
He also dismissed the concerns about the token unlocks, saying that although more than 1.3 billion STRK tokens (valued at more than $2.15 billion) will be unlocked in April, he believes this will not cause harm to the community and the team’s main focus is to drive the development of Starknet rather than short-term token price fluctuations.
Following this backlash that ensued after the airdrop announcement, Starknet stated that ordinary users were not the main thing for any project, but good developers.
Since then network activity on Starknet plummeted from 220K to 25K transactions per day.
Starknet’s airdrop was among the most anticipated events in the crypto space, as it marks the launch of a promising scaling solution that aims to improve the performance and usability of Ethereum.
However, it also highlights the challenges and trade-offs involved in designing a fair and inclusive token distribution that satisfies the diverse and sometimes conflicting interests of the crypto community.
On February 20, 2024 (less than 24 hours from now), the market awaits to see how the TGE will unfold.
Stay tuned for updates.
