StarkWare, the developer of Starknet (STRK), has made changes to its token unlock schedule in response to concerns raised by the network’s investors. The original plan had raised worries that investors would dump their tokens on retail Starknet users. The revised schedule now implements a more gradual token unlock process over three years, with smaller periodic token drops. This is a departure from the original plan of a larger drop within two months. StarkWare announced the adjustments on February 22nd, stating that they had reviewed feedback and decided to make the unlocking timeline more gradual.
Under the new schedule, 64 million STRK tokens worth nearly $125.5 million, representing 0.64% of the total supply, will be unlocked on April 15th. The unlocking process will continue with monthly drops of 64 million STRK until March 15th of the following year. From there, it will increase to 127 million STRK per month for the next two years until March 15th, 2027.
Initially, the plan was to unlock over 1.3 billion STRK, which accounted for about 13% of the total supply worth over $2.5 billion, on April 15th, just two months after the token’s launch on February 20th. However, with the new unlock plan, only 580 million tokens held by early contributors and investors will be unlocked by the end of 2024, reducing the number of unlocked tokens by 2 billion compared to the previous schedule.
The original unlock schedule had caused controversy among Starknet users and market commentators who expressed concerns about the short timeline, arguing that it would allow investors to take advantage of retail Starknet users as a means of liquidating their positions.
Following the announcement of the updated token unlock schedule, STRK experienced a brief price spike, with a nearly 5% increase in the last day, according to CoinGecko. The price of STRK had dropped almost 60% from its peak of $4.41 on February 20th to trade below $1.90 in the two days after launch. However, it briefly climbed above $2 after StarkWare’s latest announcement.
During the February 20th airdrop, 700 million STRK tokens were made available to over 1.3 million wallets. The airdrop saw significant early uptake, with 45 million STRK secured within the first hour and a half. So far, over 436 million STRK have been claimed by eligible participants, which accounts for approximately 94% of the total STRK currently available for distribution, according to Voyager data.
In addition, the total value locked in Starknet has surpassed $100 million for the first time, doubling in the last 24 hours to reach $118 million, as reported by DefiLlama.