Starknet populated by airdrop hunters ahead of token launch: Report

A much-anticipated airdrop from Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Starknet may be dominated by airdrop farmers.

According to a February 15 report by Yearn Finance developer banteg, 1,854 individuals allegedly renamed or deleted their accounts after a blockchain snapshot was taken for the basis of the Starknet airdrop next Monday. The Starknet Foundation will allocate 700 million STRK tokens out of a total of 1.8 billion to 1.3 million eligible wallet addresses on February 20, with 50% of the tokens going to protocol users. 

However, citing GitHub data, banteg claims that 1,175 out of the alleged 1,854 renamed accounts have identical historical GitHub IDs, and that excluding such accounts from the airdrop snapshot would reduce the number of eligible wallets by 701,544.

“Around half of the names are squatted, but squatters stand no chance. I will personally ensure you steal zero coins from the real devs,” he wrote. 

Airdrop hunters aim to make money by farming tokens from airdrops, hoping they will become valuable. Professional airdrop hunters utilize scripts to consolidate many different addresses into only a handful. Last March, it was revealed that airdrop hunters consolidated $3.3 million worth of tokens from the then Arbitrum (ARB) airdrop from 1,496 wallets into just two wallets they had controlled.

Launched in December 2022, Starknet currently has $55 million in total value locked (TVL), with decentralized finance protocol Nostra accounting for approximately 30% of TVL volume.

Ethereum solo and liquid stakes, Starknet developers and users, as well as projects and developers from outside the Web3 ecosystem, will be eligible for the airdrop. However, the airdrop is not available to be claimed by any U.S. and U.K. persons or entities, and by citizens of countries sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Related: Arbitrum airdrop sees 1,500 addresses consolidate $3.3M into two wallets