An eagerly awaited airdrop from the Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution Starknet may be dominated by airdrop farmers, according to a report by Banteg, a developer for Yearn Finance. After a blockchain snapshot was taken for the Starknet airdrop on February 15, it is alleged that 1,854 individuals either renamed or deleted their accounts. The Starknet Foundation plans to distribute 700 million STRK tokens out of a total of 1.8 billion to 1.3 million eligible wallet addresses on February 20, with 50% of the tokens going to protocol users.
However, Banteg, citing GitHub data, claims that 1,175 of the renamed accounts have identical historical GitHub IDs. If these accounts are excluded from the airdrop snapshot, it would reduce the number of eligible wallets by 701,544. Banteg assured that squatters would not be able to steal any coins from the real developers.
Airdrop hunters aim to profit by farming tokens from airdrops, hoping they will increase in value. These hunters use scripts to consolidate multiple addresses into just a few. In a similar case last March, airdrop hunters consolidated $3.3 million worth of tokens from the Arbitrum airdrop into two wallets that they controlled, despite the tokens being distributed to 1,496 wallets.
Launched in December 2022, Starknet currently has a total value locked (TVL) of $55 million, with the Nostra decentralized finance protocol accounting for approximately 30% of the TVL volume.
The airdrop will be available to Ethereum solo and liquid stakes, Starknet developers and users, as well as projects and developers outside the Web3 ecosystem. However, individuals or entities in the United States or the United Kingdom, or citizens of countries sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, are not eligible to claim the airdrop.
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During the Arbitrum airdrop, 1,500 addresses consolidated $3.3 million worth of tokens into just two wallets.