Controversies notwithstanding, Starknet airdrop achieves significant success

The highly anticipated Ethereum layer-2 solution, Starknet, has experienced overwhelming demand during its airdrop, resulting in a market cap exceeding $20 billion. On February 20th, the developers of Starknet distributed approximately 700 million STRK tokens, out of a total supply of 10 billion, as rewards to various stakeholders, including Ethereum users, developers, projects outside of the Web3 ecosystem, and Starknet users. Within the first 90 minutes, 45 million STRK tokens were claimed, and this number has now surpassed 220 million.
Users have until June 20, 2024, to claim the remaining balance. Despite the initial enthusiasm from investors, the price of STRK tokens has dropped to $2 from its opening high price of $7 on the Binance crypto exchange. However, the protocol still maintains a high valuation, with a total value locked of $57 million.
On the same day, Banteg, a developer from Yearn Finance, accused Starknet developers of including airdrop squatters (or hunters) in the eligibility list, despite prior warnings. Banteg stated that only the data from the squatters was used, not the renames, but received confirmation from Starknet developers that the renamed developers would not be excluded. More information is expected to be revealed in the coming days.
Earlier, Banteg had cautioned that out of the 1.3 million wallet addresses eligible for the STRK airdrop, approximately 701,544 addresses were allegedly associated with repeated or renamed GitHub accounts controlled by airdrop squatters.
Airdrop hunters engage in the practice of collecting tokens from airdrops in the hopes that they will increase in value. Professional airdrop hunters use scripts to consolidate numerous addresses into just a few. In March of last year, it was discovered that airdrop hunters had consolidated $3.3 million worth of tokens from the Arbitrum (ARB) airdrop into only two wallets that they controlled, originating from 1,496 different wallets.
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The risks and implications of crypto airdrop hunting for blockchain developers