StarkNet founder reviews the airdrop: how to view the community's angry feedback, future plans, and personal feelings

Original Title: Airdrop Reflections

Author: Eli Ben-Sasson, Founder of Starknet

Compiled by: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

Now that the first phase of the Starknet airdrop event (Provisions) has concluded, I would like to share some of my personal reflections. Nothing mentioned here constitutes investment advice, nor does it necessarily reflect the views of StarkWare or the Starknet Foundation. DYOR.

What is Starknet? Why have STRK?

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

The STRK token empowers those who wish to contribute to the ecosystem to play a role in the governance, operation, and protection of the Starknet network. STRK primarily has three major use cases—governance, paying gas fees on Starknet, and participating in Starknet's consensus mechanism.

The Starknet Foundation is distributing STRK through various initiatives to those precious community members who have already proven their desire to advance, maintain, and protect Starknet, such as Devonomics, Catalyst, DeFi Spring, and the focus of this article, Provisions (i.e., the airdrop).

On February 14, 2024, the Starknet Foundation announced the first round plan for Provisions, expecting to allocate up to 700 million STRK tokens, which are part of the 900 million STRK reserved for the Provisions event. The claiming period lasted four months, starting from February 20, 2024, and ending on June 20, 2024. Ultimately, approximately 500 million tokens were claimed, with about 400 million STRK remaining 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, namely real users, who will engage in 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 societies to achieve any social function they need on top of it, such as currency, assets, and governance, among others. Therefore, the security of Starknet is directly related to the number and resilience of the people who care about it.

One major challenge faced by Provisions is that "blockchains cannot represent real humans." What I mean is that the basic unit on-chain is the account address, not humans/users, and there is no clear correspondence between the two; one person may control multiple addresses.

Based on the existing on-chain information, 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 question is, based on on-chain and other data about accounts and their activities, how can we reasonably allocate STRK to humans/users who are long-term aligned with Starknet's mission?

First, it is essential to clarify that the existing data is simply insufficient to accurately solve this problem. Everyone involved in the design work of Provisions realized early on that all potential computational methods could only yield a relative result and could not precisely achieve all goals—there would be some humans/users who are entirely aligned with Starknet's mission but could only receive a small amount of tokens, or even none at all; conversely, there would be humans/users who are less aligned with the mission receiving a large number of tokens.

Given the public criticism faced by Starknet Provisions, as well as the subsequent criticisms directed at airdrops from Eigenlayer, ZKsync, and LayerZero, I believe it is necessary to clarify this point. To my knowledge, there is no existing solution that can achieve the above goals more accurately or fairly than we have. The distribution plan may not be perfect, but adopting other metrics would also lead to inaccuracies in different scenarios.

How did the Starknet Foundation design the airdrop?

The Starknet Foundation included six groups in the airdrop, with allocations within each group based on metrics/data relevant to that group.

• Starknet Users: Primarily considering address activity metrics, with external third-party witch hunts conducted;

• Early Adopters of STARK: Allocated based on users' prior usage of StarkEx before Starknet;

• Ethereum Contributors: Mainly includes individuals who have contributed to Ethereum in various ways (staking, development, submitting Ethereum Improvement Proposals, etc.), with specific metrics set for each sub-category;

• Github Developers: Allocated to developers of selected open-source code projects on Github based on Github activity metrics.

• Early Community Member Program (ECMP): Individuals who have contributed to the Starknet ecosystem by organizing events, promoting Starknet community development, etc., can apply in advance to receive tokens. A committee composed of ecosystem members will decide on allocations based on review results.

• Developer Partners (DP): Infrastructure developers who have previously reached agreements with the Starknet Foundation can also receive token allocations. This is an agreement reached between the Starknet Foundation and developer teams in advance.

In summary, the fundamental idea of Starknet is to attempt to distribute STRK to a diverse range of groups based on their past actions and contributions, as Starknet believes these groups are well-suited to operate, care for, and protect the future of Starknet.

Did Provisions achieve its goals?

As mentioned earlier, due to the lack of metrics, we have been clear from the beginning that the distribution of STRK could not be entirely accurate. This leads to several questions: Have we made significant efforts based on the data at hand? How do we evaluate the distribution results—how closely do the addresses included in the airdrop correspond to real humans/users?

• Among the six groups mentioned above, the last three groups can be definitively matched to real humans, and we can even further speculate that these individuals are likely to continue caring about the future of Starknet.

• For the third group (Ethereum Contributors), aside from the staking sub-group, most of the other sub-groups included in the airdrop likely meet the "one address corresponds to one human/user" standard, and their past actions have indicated their willingness to care about the decentralization process, so we can hope they will also care for and assist Starknet.

• The second group (StarkEx Users), as early adopters of STARK technology, is the group with the lowest claiming rate and airdrop scale (only 2.4 million STRK were claimed, less than 1% of the total allocation), so it can be disregarded.

• The most challenging to assess is the distribution result for Starknet Users, who received over 87% of the airdrop share (over 430 million STRK). Public dissatisfaction following Provisions has primarily focused on the distribution to this group.

There has been much discussion on social media about this matter, most of which is very negative, with many mentioning the balance threshold issue—Starknet required holding at least 0.005 ETH on a specific date. There have also been other controversial incidents, such as a StarkWare executive's harsh remarks igniting community outrage, which he quickly apologized for; the unlocking plan for StarkWare shareholders (including investors, founders, and employees) was also criticized, and we subsequently modified the unlocking plan.

Criticism regarding the "0.005 ETH threshold" and "electronic panhandling" has persisted for a long time. Although recent new airdrop controversies have significantly reduced criticism of these two issues, it has not completely disappeared.

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

So far, I have discussed the social media sentiment related to the distribution of Starknet Users, and now it is time to consider a larger question. Did Starknet's airdrop perform well? The answer is I don't know, because we lack the metrics needed to answer this question, which is the same issue we faced initially in accurately completing the token distribution. On-chain available metrics, such as TPS, TVL, number of addresses, and token price, do not directly answer the question—"Are the holders of STRK a broad and diverse group? Will they stay and continue to improve, operate, and protect Starknet?"

I also very much want to know the answer to this question. If you have thoughts on how to address this issue, please share your views on the Starknet community forum and @ me.

How do I personally feel?

This question may sound a bit strange, but I believe many people want to hear the answer. The entire team has been under immense mental pressure during the Provisions work, especially Abdel and me, as we have been the primary targets of personal attacks.

To cope with the Twitter information stream filled with misinformation (and even worse), we have not only supported each other within the Starknet Foundation or StarkWare team but have also relied on the unwavering support of the amazing Starknet ecosystem. Although this period has been challenging, it ultimately proved valuable, highlighting areas that need improvement and testing our team's resilience.

We have learned the importance of making firm decisions while also recognizing the need to be open to constructive feedback, even when that feedback is harsh. This experience has reinforced our belief that in the crypto space, handling public pressure is as important as technical decision-making. It is incredibly encouraging to see people from other ecosystems (sometimes even our competitors) reaching out to offer support, and I will never forget those helps. Most importantly, we draw strength from the amazing Starknet ecosystem.

How can we do better in the future?

Approximately 400 million STRK will be used for future airdrop rounds; how can we do better?

Clearly, "identity verification" on the blockchain is a challenging problem to solve, and we cannot be sure if we can resolve it, but this is precisely the direction we are passionate about pursuing.

Professional airdrop farming teams still have strong motivations to influence subsequent airdrop rounds, which means that whatever we do will provoke public protests on social media. To me, this is an unavoidable and unpleasant aspect of the cryptocurrency industry.

I hope the Starknet Foundation and its related Provisions teams can find new solutions to allocate tokens to a diverse group that cares about Starknet's long-term vision and mission and is willing to stay and help it grow. I know this is their wish, and they are researching and discussing ways to achieve this goal.

In summary, Provisions aims to put STRK into the "right hands." Honestly, I do not know if the Starknet Foundation's design (especially regarding the distribution to Starknet Users) is precise enough, and I hope future community research can answer this question. I will certainly 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 from people inside and outside the ecosystem regarding the token distribution mechanism; if you have any, please feel free to express them on the Starknet community forum.