coinengineer.io
Nostra founder David Garai has resigned as the CEO of the Starknet-based DeFi project less than two weeks after its NSTR token went live with an airdrop that had no vesting periods. Following the announcement, the NSTR token fell around 4%. Garai claims he hasn’t sold any tokens.
“I have resigned as CEO of Nostra,” Garai posted on X. “I’m taking a lil break for the first time in 4 years and then I will be back. Stay tuned for my future plans.”
The Nostra app, developed by Nostra Labs, enables users to lend, borrow, swap, and bridge cryptocurrencies. Over the past two and a half years, Garai claimed that Nostra has become the largest and most profitable protocol on Starknet, generating $2.5 million in annual revenue and more than $180 million in total value locked (TVL). According to DeFi Llama data, Nostra’s current TVL is $153.4 million, peaking at $221.4 million just before the airdrop.
Richard Thomas-Pryce, Tempus Labs’ Head of Product, will take over as the “day-to-day lead” of Nostra Labs. Tempus Labs is the legal entity behind Nostra Labs. Garai stated, “Under the leadership of [Richard Thomas-Pryce], Nostra (and its 12 full-time builders) will continue developing the product suite for the Super App, with Nostra Earn coming soon, as well as STRK liquid staking, for which Nostra is well positioned to be the frontrunner.”
Garai’s resignation, occurring just 11 days after the NSTR token went live, has led some community members to question the timing. Garai responded that he hasn’t “sold a single token.”
The total supply of NSTR is 100 million tokens, with a current market cap of $9.6 million, according to CoinGecko. 100% of the NSTR tokens were unlocked at launch, with 11% airdropped to the community at the token generation event. Additionally, 25% of the total supply was allocated to the project’s treasury, 14% to future airdrops, 26.2% to investors, and 23.8% to the team. The project described these allocations as part of the “fairest launch in crypto.”
NSTR’s price fell around 4% following Garai’s announcement but has since recovered slightly, currently trading at $0.0967 according to CoinGecko data.