An eagerly awaited airdrop from Ethereum’s layer-2 scaling solution Starknet may be dominated by airdrop farmers, according to a report by Yearn Finance developer Banteg on February 15. Allegedly, 1,854 individuals changed or deleted their accounts after a blockchain snapshot was taken for the Starknet airdrop scheduled for next Monday. 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, points out that 1,175 of the aforementioned 1,854 renamed accounts have identical historical GitHub IDs. If these accounts are excluded from the airdrop snapshot, the number of eligible wallets would decrease by 701,544. Banteg assures that squatters, who occupy account names without any chance of gaining coins, will not be able to steal from the actual developers.
Airdrop hunters aim to profit by accumulating tokens from airdrops in hopes that they will increase in value. Professional airdrop hunters use scripts to consolidate multiple addresses into a few. In March of last year, it was revealed that airdrop hunters consolidated $3.3 million worth of tokens from the Arbitrum (ARB) airdrop into just two wallets that they controlled, despite originally coming from 1,496 wallets.
Starknet, launched in December 2022, currently has a total value locked (TVL) of $55 million, with Nostra, a decentralized finance protocol, accounting for about 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 from outside the Web3 ecosystem. However, individuals or entities in the United States or the United Kingdom, as well as citizens of countries sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, are not eligible to claim the airdrop.
Related: The Arbitrum airdrop resulted in 1,500 addresses consolidating $3.3 million into two wallets.