Ethereum Layer-2 Starknet Reveals STRK Token Airdrop

The airdrops keep coming. 

The team behind Starknet, a layer-2 Ethereum scaling network, plans to allocate over 1.8 billion STRK tokens to community members and stakeholders, according to an announcement made Friday by the Starknet Foundation. 

The Starknet Foundation did not give a timeline for the airdrops, stating only that the first phase of the giveaway will begin “soon.”

Some 900 million STRK tokens have been allocated to “reward past and future contributions by users and community members.” What exact criteria will dictate which Starknet users will receive those tokens, and how many, has not yet been announced. 

A further 900 million STRK will go towards user rebates, the Starknet Foundation said. Planning for that initiative is still underway, but it appears it will recoup the cost of some amount of network transaction fees for Starknet users. 

Beyond those 1.8 billion tokens, the blockchain’s overseers also intend to distribute an additional 50 million STRK tokens to incentivize decentralized finance (DeFi) activity on Starknet. These tokens will be directly, indirectly, and retroactively distributed to Starknet DeFi users, according to the Starknet Foundation. 

Starknet community members were quick to celebrate the announcement, hailing it as a major boon for the blockchain. 

And they have good reason to be in high spirits: similar airdrops made by other blockchain projects have flooded crypto users with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free tokens in recent weeks.

On Thursday, a similar airdrop by Solana-based DeFi platform Jito put $225 million worth of freshly minted JTO tokens in the hands of users and community members. Late last month, an airdrop for DeFi oracles network Pyth gave away $77 million worth of PYTH tokens.

Airdrops have become an increasingly popular way for crypto projects—and recently, DeFi projects in particular—to attract a larger user base and encourage loyalty among existing community members. 

Starknet, which uses zero-knowledge rollups to make on-chain Ethereum transactions faster and cheaper, has already seen tremendous growth this year. This spring, the network’s total value locked (TVL) increased ten-fold, from $1.45 million to over $10 million. Since then Starknet’s TVL has tripled again, to $33.84 million at writing, according to DeFi Llama.

Edited by Andrew Hayward