Starknet Drops 49% Following Highly Anticipated STRK Airdrop

Ethereum layer-2 network Starknet has opened the airdrop for its STRK governance token, allowing more than one million crypto users to claim their stake of the network.

The token has also been listed on major exchanges including Binance, KuCoin, and OKX. At the time of writing it’s trading for $2.56 apiece, according to CoinGecko—having already dropped by 49% in value since going live.

According to data from TokenFlow, about 51,000 users have claimed their tokens so far, representing 4.8% of all users eligible for claims. That includes 69,859,276.8 tokens out of nearly 600 million that the project’s team, Starkware, has allocated for distribution.

Nevertheless, with a circulating supply of 728 million tokens, that gives STRK a market capitalization of approximately $2 billion, making it the 51st largest crypto overall.

STRK affords holders the ability to play a role in Starknet governance, pay network transaction fees, and to participate in its consensus mechanism through staking.

Eligible airdrop participants include Starknet users, developers, and early community members, alongside developers, authors, and stakers within the Ethereum ecosystem at large.

Last week, Starkware co-founder and CEO Eli Ben-Sasson told Decrypt that the token is “part of a very serious value-driven process of decentralization,” that brings democratic values and stability to the network.

Starkware received major backlash plans to unlock 1.3 billion STRK tokens allocated to early Starknet investors and contributors by April 15—just two months after trading officially began.

Unlock periods for other projects tend to be much longer to show that founders are interested in building the ecosystem rather than dumping their coins on post-launch hype.

“As far as the eye can see, the only thing on the radar of Starkware’s 150 employees—and its expanding team—will be advancing Starknet,” said Ben-Sasson in response.

Network activity on Starknet fell sharply last week after a brief spike in response to its airdrop announcement. Trading volume peaked at $122 million in one day on February 14. As of yesterday, volume showed signs of rebounded and reached $89 million according to CoinGecko.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.