Now that the first phase of claiming for the Starknet airdrop event (Provisions) has ended, I would like to share some of my personal feelings. Nothing stated below constitutes investment advice and does not necessarily reflect the position of StarkWare or the Starknet Foundation. DYOR.
What is Starknet? Why $STRK?
Starknet is a ZK-Rollup network. We launched Starknet in Alpha mode in November 2021, which aims to leverage the STARKs cryptographic protocol to scale Ethereum without compromising Ethereum's core principles, such as decentralization, transparency, inclusivity, and security etc.
The $STRK token empowers those who wish to contribute to the ecosystem to play a role in governing, operating, and protecting the Starknet network. $STRK has three main applications - governance, paying gas fees on Starknet, and participating in Starknet's consensus mechanism.
The Starknet Foundation is distributing $STRK through multiple events to valuable community members who have proven they want to advance, maintain, and protect Starknet, such as Devonomics, Catalyst, DeFi Spring, and the focus of this article, Provisions (i.e. airdrops).
On February 14, 2024, the Starknet Foundation announced the first round of Provisions plans, which is expected to distribute up to 700 million $STRK tokens, which will come from the 900 million $STRK reserved for the Provisions activity. Claiming lasted four months, starting on February 20 and ending on June 20, 2024. In the end, approximately 500 million tokens were claimed, with the remaining approximately 400 million $STRK being used for future airdrop rounds. .
What is the goal of Provisions?
The main goal of Provisions is to distribute $STRK tokens to a wide range of individuals, that is, real users, who will conduct activities on Starknet and contribute to its security and governance, thereby advancing the decentralization process of Starknet . Starknet is both a technology and a social tool that allows individuals and society to implement any social functions they need on top of it, such as currency, assets, governance, etc. Therefore, the security of Starknet is directly related to the size and resilience of the people who care about it.
One of the challenges faced by Provisions is that "blockchain cannot represent real humans." What I mean is that the basic unit on the chain is the account address, not the human being/user, there is no clear correspondence between the two, and one person may control multiple addresses.
Based on the information available on the chain, it is difficult to determine which accounts represent humans/users who are more likely to contribute to the future operations, security, and governance of Starknet. In other words, our question is, based on data about accounts and their activity on-chain and elsewhere, how can $STRK be properly allocated to humans/users that are long-term aligned with Starknet’s mission?
The first thing to make clear is that the existing data are simply not sufficient to accurately address this question. Everyone involved in the design work of Provisions realized early on that all potential calculation methods can only produce a relative result, and cannot accurately achieve all goals-there will be some humans/users who are completely consistent with the Starknet mission. You can get a small amount of tokens, or even no tokens at all; there are also humans/users who are not consistent with the mission and get a lot of tokens.
Given the public criticism faced by Starknet Provisions, and subsequently by airdrops like Eigenlayer, ZKsync, and LayerZero, I felt it was worth clarifying this point. To my knowledge, there is no existing scheme that achieves the above goals more accurately or equitably than ours. The allocation may not be perfect, but using other indicators can lead to inaccuracies in different situations.
How did the Starknet Foundation design the airdrop?
The Starknet Foundation included six groups in the airdrop, and allocations within each group were based on metrics/data related to that group.
Starknet users: Mainly consider address activity indicators, and entrust an external third party to conduct witch screening;
STARK early adopters: allocated based on users’ use of StarkEx before Starknet;
Ethereum contributors: mainly include individuals who contribute to Ethereum in various ways (staking, developing, submitting Ethereum improvement proposals, etc.), with specific indicators for each subcategory;
Github Developers: Developers on select open source code projects on Github are assigned based on Github activity metrics.
Early Community Membership Program (ECMP): Individuals who contribute to the Starknet ecosystem by organizing events, promoting the development of the Starknet community, etc. can obtain tokens by applying in advance. A committee of Ecology Department members will decide on allocations based on the results of the review.
Developer Partners (DP): Infrastructure developers who have previously entered into agreements with the Starknet Foundation may also receive token allocations. This is an agreement reached in advance between the Starknet Foundation and the developer team.
All in all, the basic philosophy of Starknet is to try to distribute $STRK to a diverse set of groups that, based on their past actions and contributions, Starknet believes are well suited to operate, care for, and protect the future of Starknet.
Did Provisions achieve its goals?
As mentioned earlier, it was clear from the beginning that the allocation of $STRK would not be completely accurate due to the inadequacy of the metric. This raises several questions: Are we doing the best we can with the data we have? How do we evaluate the allocation results - to what extent do the addresses included in the airdrop correspond to real humans/users?
Among the above six types of groups, the last three types of groups can be determined to correspond one-to-one with real humans, and we can even further speculate that these people are likely to continue to care about the future of Starknet.
For the third type of group (Ethereum contributors), except for the staking subgroup, most of the other subgroups included in the airdrop may meet the standard of "one address corresponds to one human/user", and their past actions have shown that they are willing to care about the decentralization process, so we can hope that they will also care about and help Starknet.
The second group (StarkEx users), as early adopters of STARK technology, is the group with the smallest claim rate and airdrop size (only 2.4 million $STRK has been claimed, less than 1% of the total allocation), so it can be ignored .
The most difficult thing to evaluate is the distribution results to Starknet users. This group received over 87% of the airdrop market share (over 430 million $STRK). Public dissatisfaction following Provisions also focused largely on allocations to this group.
There has been a lot of chatter about this on social media, much of it very negative, with many mentioning the balance threshold issue - Starknet requires holding at least 0.005 Ethereum on a specific date. In addition, there are other controversial incidents, such as the fierce words of a senior StarkWare executive that aroused the anger of the community, and he quickly apologized for it; the unlocking plan of StarkWare shareholders (including investors, founders and employees) It also received criticism, and we later modified the unlocking plan.
Criticisms about the "0.005 Ethereum threshold" and "electronic beggars" have lasted for a long time. Although recently with the emergence of some new airdrop controversies, criticisms about these two issues have been greatly reduced, but they have not completely disappeared yet.
What should we make of this outrage from the community? To what extent does it come from professional farming teams trying to rationally influence airdrop criteria for this round and subsequent rounds (not limited to Starknet)? To what extent is it representative of a certain group (Farmer or non-Farmer)? Would they have contributed to Starknet's long-term success if a different distribution approach had been adopted? These are research questions that I would like to see answered. If you have a solution to this problem, please post your suggestion on the Starknet community forum and @ me.
So far I've discussed social media sentiment related to Starknet user distribution, and now it's time to consider a larger issue. How well did Starknet airdrop? The answer is I don’t know, and the reason is that we lack the metrics needed to answer this question, which is the same problem as our inability to accurately complete the token allocation in the first place. The metrics available on the chain, such as TPS, TVL, number of addresses, and currency prices, cannot directly answer the following question - "Are the holders of $STRK a broad and diverse group of people? Will they stay and continue Improving, operating and protecting Starknet?"
I'd love to get an answer to this question too. If you have ideas for how to deal with this issue, please post your thoughts on the Starknet community forums and @ me.
How do I feel personally?
This question may sound a little strange, but I'm sure many people would like to hear the answer. The entire team was under tremendous mental pressure working at Provisions, but Abdel and I in particular were the targets of physical attacks.
To combat a Twitter feed filled with misinformation (or worse), we not only support each other within the Starknet Foundation or within the StarkWare team, but we rely on the ongoing support of the amazing Starknet ecosystem. While this was a difficult period to navigate, it ultimately proved valuable, highlighting areas for improvement and testing the resilience of our team.
We learned the importance of firm decision-making but also the need to be open to constructive feedback, even if it was harsh. This experience reinforced our belief that in the crypto industry, the way you handle public pressure is as important as technical decisions. Seeing people from other ecosystems (sometimes even our competitors) reaching out and offering support was very encouraging and something I will never forget. Most importantly, we draw power from the amazing Starknet ecosystem.
How can we do better in the future?
With approximately 400 million $STRK still slated for future airdrop rounds, how can we do better?
Obviously, "identity proof" on the blockchain is a difficult problem to solve, and we are not sure whether we can solve it, but this is the direction we are keen to pursue.
Professional Airdrop Farming The team’s motivation to influence subsequent airdrop rounds remains strong, which means that no matter what we do there will be public outcry on social media. To me, this is an unavoidable and unpleasant side of the cryptocurrency industry.
I hope that the Starknet Foundation and its Provisions team can find new ways to allocate tokens to a diverse group of people who care about Starknet's long-term vision and mission and are willing to stay and help it grow. I know this is their desire and they are conducting research and discussions on how to achieve this goal.
All in all, Provisions aims to put $STRK in “the right hands.” To be honest, I don’t know if the design of the Starknet Foundation (especially the design of the distribution of Starknet users) is accurate enough, and I hope that future community research can answer this question. I'll definitely continue to think about this and plan to share my advice at some point in the future.
I'd love to hear more thoughts on the token distribution mechanism from people inside and outside the ecosystem, and if you have any, please feel free to share them on the Starknet community forums.
[Disclaimer] There are risks in the market, so investment needs to be cautious. This article does not constitute investment advice, and users should consider whether any opinions, views or conclusions contained in this article are appropriate for their particular circumstances. Invest accordingly and do so at your own risk.
This article is reprinted with permission from: "Rhythm Blockbeats"
Original author: Eli Ben-Sasson, founder of Starknet
