Starknet’s STRK opens trading under $4 after airdrop

Starknet’s token STRK traded as high as $3.66 on opening day before retracing over 7% as some airdrop recipients booked profits after months of farming and ecosystem contribution. 

The Starknet native crypto debuted at a $1.5 billion market cap and boasts over $900 million in trading volume on day one. STRK is tradable on leading decentralized exchanges, like Uniswap, and centralized venues, such as Binance.

Starknet plans to distribute 700 million STRK tokens to 1.3 million wallet addresses. The Starket Foundation, a non-profit supporting STRK, opened its claiming portal around noon UTC to a flurry of activity. 

Over five million STRK coins were claimed in the first minutes, and recipients claimed around a million tokens per minute during the initial 30 minutes, Starkware spokesperson Nathan Jeffay told crypto.news in an email. 

Per the protocol’s official X page, over 100,000 users had claimed tokens at press time. 

The opening of the Provisions portal is a momentous occasion that’s been years in the making. The distribution of the STRK tokens puts power into the hands of our community. The future is bright for our decentralized blockchain that caters to many individuals rather than just a few.

Eli Ben-Sasson, StarkWare CEO

Eligible wallets have four months to claim their tokens. This gives users until June 20 to visit the portal and receive free STRK. The airdrop allocation has no lockup period and can be deployed for governance purposes or sold on the open markets. 

Holders can also choose to pay for transaction fees in STRK, thanks to a proposal that approved the coin as a native gas token on Starknet’s Ethereum-based L2 scaling solution.

Starknet airdrop woes

In related news, Starknet saw a sharp decline in active users following its airdrop announcement. Active addresses on the network peaked at around 225,000 on Feb. 14, before the date for distribution was disclosed. 

Activity fell by nearly 57% hours before the claiming portal opened, down to just over 84,200 users, per Starkscan. 

Starknet received backlash from community members who felt the airdrop allocation was unfair to some users. In one case, an airdrop farmer received thousands of tokens for spell-checking text on the project’s GitHub. Another participant said they missed the drop because they had less than 0.005 Ether (ETH) in the wallet when the snapshot was taken.  

In response to these complaints, the team said important updates built on feedback were implemented.