A long-awaited airdrop of Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution Starknet could be overrun by airdrop hunters.
According to a report from Yearn Finance developer banteg on February 15, 1,854 individuals allegedly renamed or deleted their accounts after a snapshot of the blockchain was taken as the basis for Starknet’s airdrop scheduled for the following Monday. Starknet Foundation will allocate 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 tokens going to protocol users.
However, citing GitHub data, banteg claims 1,175 out of the alleged 1,854 renamed accounts have identical historical GitHub IDs, and excluding such accounts from the airdrop snapshot would reduce the number of eligible wallets to 701,544.
“About half of the names are front-runners, but they won’t stand a chance. I’ll personally make sure they don’t steal any coins from the real developers,” he wrote.
Airdrop hunters seek to profit by harvesting airdrop tokens, hoping they become valuable. Professional airdrop hunters use scripts to consolidate many different addresses into just a few. Last March, it was revealed that airdrop hunters consolidated $3.3 million in tokens from the then-Arbitrum (ARB) airdrop from 1,496 wallets into just two wallets they controlled.
Launched in December 2022, Starknet currently has $55 million in total value locked (TVL), with decentralized finance protocol Nostra representing approximately 30% of TVL volume.
Solo and liquid Ethereum stakes, Starknet developers and users, as well as projects and developers outside the Web3 ecosystem, will be eligible for the airdrop. However, the airdrop is not available to be claimed by any individual or entity from the U.S. and the UK, and citizens of countries sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.