Ahead of the token launch, the highly anticipated airdrop associated with Ethereum’s Starknet layer-2 scaling solution seems to be attracting a significant number of airdrop farmers.
As per a report dated February 15 by banteg, a developer at Yearn Finance, there have been purportedly 1,854 instances of individuals either renaming or deleting their accounts subsequent to a blockchain snapshot taken for the forthcoming Starknet airdrop slated for next Monday. The Starknet Foundation plans to distribute 700 million STRK tokens out of a total of 1.8 billion to approximately 1.3 million qualifying wallet addresses on February 20, with 50% of the tokens earmarked for protocol users.
Yet, according to banteg’s analysis of GitHub data, out of the mentioned 1,854 altered accounts, 1,175 share identical historical GitHub IDs. He suggests that excluding these accounts from the airdrop snapshot would lead to a reduction in 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,” banteg assured.
Airdrop hunters are individuals seeking to profit by accumulating tokens from airdrops, speculating on their potential future value. Sophisticated airdrop hunters often employ scripts to consolidate numerous addresses into a few. Notably, in March of the previous year, it was disclosed that airdrop hunters consolidated tokens worth $3.3 million from the then Arbitrum (ARB) airdrop, originally spread across 1,496 wallets, into just two wallets under their control.
Since its launch in December 2022, Starknet has amassed a total value locked (TVL) of $55 million, with the decentralised finance protocol Nostra contributing approximately 30% of the TVL volume.
The eligibility criteria for the airdrop include Ethereum solo and liquid stakes, participation by Starknet developers and users, as well as involvement from projects and developers outside the Web3 ecosystem. However, the airdrop is inaccessible to U.S. and U.K. individuals or entities, along with citizens of nations sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.