Everything You Need to Know About the Starknet Airdrop
You may be eligible for an airdrop from Starknet that will become available to over one million wallets on Feb. 20—but the criteria are strict! Let’s take a look at what Starknet is, who is eligible, and how you can check your eligibility right now.
Starknet bills itself as a “fully open source tech stack: —in (degen) layperson’s terms, it’s an Ethereum Layer 2 rollup optimized for developers and builders of all sorts, with an emphasis on security, decentralization and permissionlessness. It allows apps to scale without compromising security by computing proofs off-chain and bundling them into a single transaction on Ethereum’s mainnet.
The team announced their long-rumored airdrop in a blog post. “Today, the Starknet Foundation is proud to introduce the Starknet Provisions Program, the first distribution of Starknet’s native token — Starknet Token (STRK) — to the dedicated community building and using the dApps that will become commonplace tomorrow. STRK is set to play an important role in several aspects of the Starknet network, including paying network fees, staking, and participating in governance votes,” the team wrote on Medium.
There was a great deal of excitement that many people active in Web3 in 2021 and 2022 would get an airdrop. On Feb. 13, many community members posted their results from a third-party checker at wenser.xyz with a section called Ethereum Early Adopters. Many analysts, including an anonymous poster called CC2Ventures, believed yesterday that this checker would indicate who was eligible for the Starknet drop.
These hopes have moderated somewhat with the Feb. 14 release of an accurate checker from Starknet itself. It is not available to people or entities located in the United States, Russia, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, or Syria.
On Feb. 13, 9dcc founder gmoney excitedly said that he had “made it into Valhalla,” posting his Wenser checker results. The following day, he expressed chagrin. “Wait, so this didn’t mean anything at all? lol,” he posted on X.
Responding to claims that it had lied, the founders of the Wenser airdrop posted on X. “We’d like to clear up some things. When we launched WENSER, we already had the Arbitrum Airdrop Simulation running on all chains, including Starknet. This was common knowledge, as we had mentioned it multiple times and also stated it on our website,” they wrote.
According to Wenser, the StarkNet team had changed the eligibility criteria for Ethereum users. “Since we already had the ‘ETH Early Adopter’ checker, everyone assumed that Starknet had not changed the airdrop criteria. However, they did. They removed the ‘ETH Early Adopter’ criteria and replaced it with new ones. When users checked their wallets on the Starknet official website, this caused frustration because WENSER was showing ‘YOU ARE ELIGIBLE’ based on the ‘ETH Early Adopter’ criteria, BUT STARKNET REMOVED THE ETH EARLY ADOPTER CRITERIA,” they explained.
To check your wallets’ eligibility, head to the official site, and connect your Starknet wallet (like Argent or Braavos) or post your wallet address.
“STRK is set to play an important role in several aspects of the Starknet network, including paying network fees, staking, and participating in governance votes.”
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Although the airdrop may have the most extensive distribution pool ever, the criteria are different from what the third-party checker had guessed. With data taken from a November 2023 snapshot, the criteria for addresses that will receive the airdrop have a heavy focus on people who use the network and create projects. Alongside users of Stark’s network, people running their own Ethereum validator at home and authors of EIPs, or Ethereum Improvement Proposals, are also eligible.
The airdrop, called the “Starknet Provisions Program,” “will be distributed to individuals and groups that have helped to lay down the roots of Starknet,” according to the team’s blog post. “This includes Starknet users, developers, and community contributors; StarkEx users; Ethereum protocol contributors and stakers; and developers of select non-crypto open-source projects,” they said.
While you can check your eligibility with an ordinary Ethereum account, you’ll need to install a Starknet-capable wallet to claim on the 20th. The claim period will last four months.
In a departure from the strategy of other recent airdrops, from Blast to Memecoin, the Starknet airdrop aims to incentivize developers and users of their ecosystem more than farmers.
It’s important to note that there will be a major unlock of Starknet investor allocations of $STARK this April, which could impact the token’s prices.