The application for the first round of Starknet Provisions airdrop has ended, and I would like to share my personal feelings with you. What is stated below is not investment advice and does not necessarily represent the position of StarkWare or the Starknet Foundation. Please conduct your own detailed research and analysis.
What is Starknet and why STRK?
To review, Starknet is a valid rollup launched in Alpha mode in November 2021, that is, "zk rollup". It extends Ethereum through a cryptographic protocol called STARK without compromising Ethereum’s core principles: breadth (i.e., “decentralization”), transparency, inclusivity, and security.
Starknet tokens enable those who contribute to the success of the ecosystem to collectively participate in the governance, ongoing operation, and security maintenance of Starknet. Tokens are used for governance, paying Starknet transaction fees, and participating in Starknet’s consensus mechanism.
Goals and Challenges of the Provisions Program
Goal: The main goal of the Provisions program is to distribute STRK tokens to a majority of real users who will operate the Starknet system and contribute to the security and governance of the system, thereby strengthening the decentralized nature of the system.
Starknet is a social tool — a technology that enables individuals and societies to implement any social function they need on top of it, such as currency, property management, and voting systems. Therefore, the security of Starknet is closely related to the breadth of people concerned about the network and their resilience to external risk challenges.
Challenge: One of the big challenges faced by Starknet Provisions is the inability of blockchain to understand humans. The basic unit on the blockchain is the account address, not the person or user. There is no clear correspondence between the two, and one person may control multiple addresses. Based on on-chain information, it is difficult to tell which accounts represent those more likely to contribute to Starknet’s future operations, security, and governance.
Allocation methods and standards
As publicly announced, the approach taken by the Starknet Foundation is to allocate tokens to six different categories of people, with allocations to each category being based on metrics/data relevant to that category. The categories and indicators used are as follows:
Starknet Users: Based on metrics of user activity and usage, eligible addresses will be filtered through a Sybil filtering system run by an external third party.
STARK Early Adopters: Users who used STARK prevention technology before the launch of Starknet (StarkEx users), allocated based on their usage.
Ethereum contributors
Individuals who contribute to Ethereum through various means will receive token allocations, including staking, developing code, participating in the Builders Guild, and/or submitting Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), with specific metrics employed for each subcategory.
Github Developers: Developers who participate in specific open source projects on Github will receive token allocations. Its activity on Github will be used as a metric.
Early Community Member Program (ECMP): Individuals who contribute to the Starknet ecosystem by hosting events and promoting the development of the Starknet community can receive token allocations by applying in advance. A committee of ecosystem members decides on the allocation of tokens based on the review of applications.
Developer Partners (DP): Starknet core infrastructure developers with pre-existing agreements with the Starknet Foundation can receive token allocations on the same day Provisions begin claiming. The distribution of tokens for this part is agreed in advance between the Starknet Foundation and the developer team.
Implementation status of Provisions plan
On February 14, 2024, the Starknet Foundation announced the first round of the Provisions program, allocating a total of up to 700 million STRK tokens from the 900 million STRK dedicated to the Provisions program. The initial claiming period will run for four months from February 20 to June 20, 2024. At the end, approximately half a billion tokens were claimed, leaving approximately four hundred million STRK tokens for future rounds.
Challenges and Reflections: Given the public criticism that Starknet Provisions has faced, and subsequent airdrops like Eigenlayer, ZKsync, and LayerZero facing similar situations, I feel it’s important to make a disclaimer that I don’t know of any tool that compares to the approach we used achieve the above objectives more accurately or fairly. The allocation method we used is not perfect, but other allocation criteria can also lead to different types of allocation inaccuracies.
in conclusion
Among the six categories of people mentioned above, the latter three categories do correspond to real human users, and we can even further speculate that these people may continue to follow Starknet. For the third category (Ethereum contributors), except for the stakers, everyone else may meet the "one address, one natural person" situation, and their past behavior shows that they care about decentralized systems, so we can expect them to do the same Will also pay attention to and help maintain Starknet. The StarkEx user category is an early adopter of STARK technology and is also the category with the smallest claim rate and size (only 2.4 million STRK claimed, less than 1% of the total allocation). The Starknet user category is the most difficult group to answer the above-mentioned related questions. It is also the category with the largest amount of tokens, receiving more than 87% of the total amount of Provisions received. Much of the public outcry about Provisions has also focused on how this group is allocated.
There's a lot of discussion about this on social media, especially Twitter. Most of them were scathing negative comments, focusing on the token allocation criteria for Starknet users, which requires accounts to hold at least 0.005 ETH on a given day. But other grievances also surfaced. Two of the issues that stand out include heated comments made by a senior StarkWare executive several months ago that were retweeted on social media and the executive later issued a public apology, and one regarding governance and transparency at StarkWare.
Future Outlook: We are always open to constructive feedback. In the future, we will continue to improve and optimize the token distribution method to ensure that more real users can participate in the Starknet ecosystem and promote its decentralized development.
In summary, while the Provisions program faces many challenges and criticisms during its implementation, it is also an opportunity for us to continuously learn and improve. We will continue to work hard to lay a solid foundation for Starknet's future development.