Starknet moves to address critics of STRK token airdrop
The Starknet Foundation’s airdrop of 700 million STRK tokens is now in full effect, as the first round of “provisions” became claimable Tuesday at 7:00 am ET.
Since last week’s announcement, Starknet has been dealing with vociferous complaints about everything from eligibility to anti-Sybil measures to decisions about STRK’s underlying tokenomics.
A “DeFi Spring” initiative announced yesterday alongside new corrective actions seeks to address some critics’ concerns.
Read more: Starknet plans ‘broad’ token distribution starting later this month
About 5 million tokens were claimed in the first five minutes, according to the Starknet Foundation, and STRK briefly traded over $3, about up 50% higher than the pre-launch futures market price, which put it at a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of about $30 billion. The price has since returned to $2.01 — which still gives it an FDV greater than that of Arbitrum.
More than 100,000 individual wallets had claimed tokens by 11:30 am ET, Starknet wrote on X.
Not all ecosystem participants are happy with the community allocation as it unfolded last week, with several groups arguing they were unfairly left out. Starknet Foundation board member and StarkWare co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson said his team is “aware of some minor things that might need to be fixed.”
“When you go and you try to distribute to 1.3 million addresses, it’s gonna be challenging and we are a very capable team technologically, and we have the best interests in getting it right,” Ben-Sasson told Blockworks. “Things that should be fixed and cannot be fixed ‘til Tuesday — we will do our best to try and fix them later on.”
The airdrop was novel in its efforts to reward Ethereum stakers. But a technical misstep appears to have earmarked STRK tokens for a subset of those stakers — Rocketpool minipool operators — to a smart contract address rather than the users’ own wallets.
Starknet is investigating, pledging to rectify inadvertent misallocations in future token releases.
“We’re aware of the feedback that some dedicated community members and network users feel they have been overlooked due to certain Provisions criteria, and we are actively working to address these concerns,” the Foundation said Tuesday in a statement sent to Blockworks.
One well-to-do solo staker running more than 1,000 validators was confused for a centralized exchange — one of several occurrences corrected by Starknet partner Rated.Network, which tracked staking activity for the Foundation.
GitHub and Starknet activity: Too much or too little?
Starknet took the unusual step of rewarding developers both in and out of the crypto industry based on their GitHub activity.
That prompted at least one developer to crow about a 1,800 STRK allocation based on fixing a single typo in a repository.
Others initially missed out due to having abandoned their GitHub username, but Starknet said they are reserving 1 million STRK for this group of 1,900 developers.
Another common criticism was the somewhat arbitrary requirement that Starknet accounts hold 0.005 ETH at the time of the November 2023 snapshot. Since most transactions cost only a small fraction of that — one of the selling points of Starknet is cheap transactions — many users who met activity requirements otherwise still received 0 STRK.