The Starknet Foundation announced Wednesday morning that starting on Feb. 20, nearly 1.3 million wallets will be able to claim their share of a distribution of STRK, the native token for the Ethereum layer 2 network based on zero-knowledge technology. They will have until June 20 to claim their tokens.
According to a press release shared with Unchained, a range of people will be eligible for the initial phase of Starknet’s token distribution. Not only will Starknet users, contributors and developers be able to pocket STRK tokens, but so will Ethereum EIP authors and solo home stakers.
“There are large buckets of allocations for people who build on Starknet, and for those who rush to the infrastructure and dApps that are built, use them, and in turn then encourage more building,” said Eli Ben-Sasson, Starknet Foundation board member and StarkWare co-founder and CEO, in the press release.
Starknet Foundation is a nonprofit organization focused on advancing the blockchain scalability solution, while StarkWare Industries is a cryptographic software company developing Starknet.
The foundation also set aside some STRK tokens for non-Web3 open-source developers. “This technology is new and potentially impactful for applications across industries, and many leaders in related technological spaces deserve to have a stake in what’s to come,” said Diego Oliva, CEO of the Starknet Foundation, in the press release.
The announcement comes about 15 months after Starknet developers first deployed the token on Ethereum, and continues a years-long tradition in the crypto ecosystem: distributing tokens to people who support the ecosystem. The press release stated that the distribution of STRK tokens will be the first of several set to occur in the future.
Largest Initial Airdrop Ever
Starknet’s airdrop will be the largest initial airdrop by the number of eligible addresses — more than Dymension, Jupiter, Arbitrum, Optimism, Uniswap and Pyth.
Read More: Dymension Airdrops Over $400 Million in DYM Tokens Amid Mainnet Launch Issues
Team members for Dymension wrote on X that over one million addresses had the opportunity to claim their airdrop of DYM. In Jupiter’s initial phase of its token distribution, 955,000 wallets were eligible for their JUP allocation, said the founder of the Solana-based decentralized exchange aggregator, who goes by “Meow” on X.
Meanwhile, a Dune dashboard created by Blockworks Research shows that about 625,000 addresses were eligible for Arbitrum’s ARB airdrop, while Optimism Foundation stated that 248,699 addresses were able to claim OP in its initial airdrop.
Uniswap on Sept. 17, 2020 “airdropped $UNI to over 250k addresses which had previously interacted with the protocol,” wrote Variant data scientist Jack Gorman in a blog post on blockchain analytics firm Dune. Additionally, phase one of the Solana-based oracle network Pyth saw about 90,000 wallets eligible to receive PYTH tokens.
As a result of addresses gaining the capability to claim STRK, token holders will also be able to provide liquidity denominated in STRK and swap STRK for other cryptocurrencies.
