Reflections from the Founder of Starknet: Airdrop

Original author: Starknet founder Eli Ben-Sasson

Compilation: Odaily Planet Daily Azuma (@azuma.eth)

Now, the first phase of the Starknet Airdrop activity (Provisions) has ended, and I would like to share some personal feelings. None of the content described below constitutes investment advice, nor does it necessarily reflect the position of StarkWare or the Starknet Foundation. DYOR.

What is Starknet? Why do we need STRK?

Starknet is a ZK-Rollup network. We launched Starknet in alpha mode in November 2021, aiming to use STARKs encryption protocol to scale Ethereum without compromising its core principles, such as decentralization, transparency, inclusivity, and security.

STRK tokens empower those who wish to contribute to the governance, operation, and protection of the Starknet network. STRK has three main use cases — governance, paying gas fees on Starknet, and participating in the consensus mechanism of Starknet.

The Starknet Foundation is distributing STRK to those valuable community members who have proven their willingness to promote, maintain, and protect Starknet through various activities, such as Devonomics, Catalyst, DeFi Spring, and the focus of this article, Provisions (i.e. Airdrop).

On February 14, 2024, the Starknet Foundation announced the first round of Provisions, which is expected to distribute up to 700 million STRK tokens, out of a total of 900 million STRK reserved for the Provisions event. The application period lasted for four months, from February 20, 2024 to June 20, and approximately 500 million tokens were ultimately claimed, with the remaining approximately 400 million STRK to be used for future airdrop rounds.

What is the goal of Provisions?

The main goal of Provisions is to distribute STRK tokens to a broad range of individuals, i.e. real users, who will be active 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 enables individuals and societies to implement any social functionality they need on top of it, such as currency, assets, and governance, etc. Therefore, the security of Starknet is directly related to the size and resilience of the community who cares about it.

One of the major challenges that Provisions faces is that “blockchain cannot represent real humans”. What I mean is that the basic unit on-chain is the account address, not the human/user, and there is no clear correspondence between the two. One person may control multiple addresses.

Based on the on-chain information available, it is difficult to determine which accounts represent humans/users who are more likely to contribute to the future operation, security, and governance of Starknet. In other words, our problem is how to reasonably allocate STRK to humans/users who are aligned with the long-term mission of Starknet based on on-chain and off-chain data about accounts and their activities.

First of all, it needs to be clear that the existing data is simply not enough to accurately solve this problem. Everyone involved in the design of Provisions has long realized that all potential calculation methods can only yield a relative result, and cannot achieve all goals accurately - there will be some humans/users who are completely aligned with the mission of Starknet who can only obtain a small amount of tokens, or even no tokens at all; while there will be humans/users who are not quite aligned with the mission obtaining a large number of tokens.

Given the public criticism faced by Starknet Provisions, as well as subsequent criticism faced by airdrops such as Eigenlayer, ZKsync, and LayerZero, I believe it is necessary to clarify this point. As far as I know, there is no existing solution that can achieve the above goals more accurately or fairly than us. The allocation scheme may not be perfect, but adopting other metrics would also lead to inaccuracies in different situations.

How does the Starknet Foundation design airdrops?

Starknet Foundation has included six communities in the airdrop, and the distribution within each community is based on the indicators/data related to the community.

• Starknet users: mainly considering address activity indicators, and entrusting external third parties to conduct witch screening;
• STARK early adopters: Allocation based on users’ usage of StarkEx before Starknet;
• Ethereum contributors: mainly includes individuals who contribute to Ethereum in various ways (staking, development, submitting Ethereum Improvement Proposals, etc.), each subcategory has specific indicators;
• Github developers: Developers who have been selected based on Github activity indicators to allocate open source code projects on Github.
• Early Community Member Program (ECMP): Individuals who contribute to the Starknet ecosystem by organizing events, promoting Starknet community development, and other means can apply in advance to receive tokens. A committee composed of ecosystem members will determine the allocation based on the review results.
• Developer Partner (DP): Infrastructure developers who had previously reached an agreement with the Starknet Foundation can also receive token distribution. This is an agreement reached in advance between the Starknet Foundation and the developer team.

In conclusion, the basic idea of Starknet is to distribute STRK to a diverse range of communities, based on their past actions and contributions. Starknet believes that these communities are well-suited to operate, care for, and protect the future of Starknet.

Have the provisions achieved their goals?

As mentioned earlier, due to the lack of standards, it is clear from the outset that the distribution of STRK cannot be completely accurate. This raises several questions: Have we made the greatest effort based on the available data? How do we evaluate the distribution result - to what extent do the addresses included in the airdrop correspond to real human/users?

• Among the six categories mentioned above, the last three categories can be determined to correspond one-to-one with real humans. We can even speculate further that these people are likely to continue to care about the future of Starknet.
• For the third group (Ethereum contributors), except for the staking subgroup, most of the 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) are early adopters of STARK technology and are the smallest group in terms of claim rate and airdrop scale (only 2.4 million STRK tokens were claimed, less than 1% of the total allocation), so they can be ignored.
• The most difficult to assess is the allocation of Starknet users, who received over 87% of the airdrop (over 4.3 billion STRK). The public’s dissatisfaction after Provisions is mainly focused on the allocation to this group.

There is a lot of discussion about this on social media, most of which is very negative. Many people have mentioned the issue of balance thresholds - Starknet requires holding at least 0.005 ETH on a specific date. There have also been other controversial incidents, such as strong remarks from a StarkWare executive that sparked community outrage, and he quickly apologized for it; the unlocking plan for StarkWare shareholders (including investors, founders, and employees) has also been criticized, and we have subsequently made changes to the unlocking plan.

Criticism of the “0.005 ETH threshold” and the “electronic beggar” has been going on for a long time. Although the criticism of these two issues has greatly diminished with the recent controversy over some new airdrops, it has not completely disappeared so far.

How should we view this anger from the community? To what extent does it come from professional farming teams trying to rationally influence the airdrop standards for this round and subsequent rounds (not limited to Starknet)? To what extent can it represent a certain group (farmers or non-farmers)? If different distribution methods are adopted, will they contribute to the long-term success of Starknet? These are research questions that I hope to see answers to. If you have a way to address this issue, please post your suggestions on the Starknet community forum and @ me.

So far, I have discussed social media sentiment related to Starknet user allocation, and now it’s time to consider a bigger question. Is the airdrop of Starknet any good? The answer is I don’t know, because we lack the metrics needed to answer that question, which is the same problem we had when we couldn’t accurately distribute tokens. On-chain metrics such as TPS, TVL, number of addresses, and coin price don’t directly answer the following questions - Are STRK holders a wide and diverse group? Will they stay and continue to improve, operate, and protect Starknet?

I also really want to get the answer to this question. If you have any ideas about dealing with this issue, please share your thoughts on the Starknet Community Forum and @ me.

What’s my personal feeling?

This question sounds a bit strange, but I believe many people want to hear the answer. The whole team is under tremendous mental pressure in Provisions work, especially Abdel and me, who are the key targets of personal attacks.

In order to cope with the Twitter feed filled with false information (and even worse), we rely not only on mutual support within the Starknet Foundation or the StarkWare team, but also on the unwavering support of the amazing ecosystem of Starknet. Although this period has been difficult, it has ultimately proven to be valuable, highlighting some areas for improvement and testing the resilience of our team.

We have come to understand the importance of resolute decision-making, while also realizing the need to be open to constructive feedback, even if it is harsh. This experience has strengthened our conviction that handling public pressure in the field of encryption is as important as technical decision-making. It is very encouraging to see people from other ecosystems (sometimes even our competitors) reaching out and providing support, and I will never forget this help. Most importantly, we have drawn strength from the amazing Starknet ecosystem.

How to do better in the future?

There are still about 400 million STRK tokens to be used for future airdrop rounds, how can we do better?

Obviously, the ‘identity proof’ on the blockchain is a very difficult problem to solve, and we cannot be sure whether it can be solved, but this is exactly the direction we are passionately pursuing.

The professional Airdrop farming team still wants to influence the motivation of subsequent Airdrop rounds, which means that whatever we do will still provoke public protests on social media. For me, this is an unavoidable and unpleasant aspect of the cryptocurrency industry.

I hope that the Starknet Foundation and its subsidiary team, Provisions, can find a new solution to distribute 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 wish, and they are also conducting research and discussions to achieve this goal.

In short, Provisions aims to deliver STRK to the “right hands”. To be honest, I don’t know if the design of Starknet Foundation (especially the allocation of Starknet users) is accurate enough. I hope that future community research can answer this question. I will definitely continue to think about this issue and plan to share my suggestions at some point in the future.

I would love to hear more thoughts on the token distribution mechanism from people inside and outside the ecosystem, if any, please feel free to express yourself on the Starknet community forum.