Behind the ‘riot’ in the Starknet community Batch airdrops frustrate users, accused of ‘favoring’ developers

Controversy in the Starknet Community Outrage over Batch Airdrops Sparks Accusations of Developer Favoritism

Author: Nancy, LianGuaiNews

Ethereum Layer2 scalability solution StarkNet is about to launch its own coin, but it has caused trouble due to airdrops.

Recently, StarkNet has been under constant criticism from community users due to its incentive program, and the reported incidents involving developers’ activities have also caused quite a stir. In the eyes of the community, StarkNet’s multi-stage airdrops not only “anti-reward” users, but also sparked public anger with its “favoritism” towards developers. LianGuaiNews interviewed Maxlion, the founder of Starknet Astro, a Chinese developer community, to understand how the community perceives this airdrop.

Rewarding developers with users’ hard-earned money?

The StarkNet Foundation has repeatedly announced multiple incentive programs, so why are developers in the spotlight?

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StarkNet has launched developer support programs multiple times. For example, in October of this year, Starknet announced the distribution of 50 million STRK tokens to early contributors to the ecosystem, rewarding individuals who encourage technical discussions, organize Starknet-related activities, and regularly release Starknet brand content. On December 8th, Starknet revealed that it will once again distribute 50 million STRK tokens to incentivize activities of DeFi protocols within the network, with the goal of increasing liquidity, transaction volume, and overall growth of DeFi on Starknet. This aims to explore direct, indirect, and traceable incentives for DeFi protocol activities, and will be implemented and deployed in the first quarter of 2024.

According to StarkNet’s token economic model, the total supply of STRK is 10 billion, with 12% allocated for developer incentives. The importance of the ecosystem to the project’s development is self-evident. Typically, self-funded projects receive support through financial incentives, but the community users are not very appreciative of StarkNet’s official project support practices.

Especially with the launch of the “devonomics” program by Starknet, the official plans to distribute 10% of all accumulated transaction operator fees (a total of 1600 ETH, over 3.5 million USD) since its launch in November 2022 to developers building on Starknet, with 8% allocated to DApp developers and 2% to core developers. Diego Oliv, CEO of StarkNet Foundation, also stated that this program can directly distribute tokens to builders of Starknet DApps and infrastructure, effectively promoting the expansion of the Starknet ecosystem.

In the eyes of the community users, StarkNet has yet to have an ecosystem project with a resilient nature in its two years of development, but it shows “special care” for developers and rewards them with users’ hard-earned money. According to L2BEZAT data, StarkNet’s TVL is about 140 million USD, lagging behind many other Layer2 projects, and it has experienced an 11% decrease in the past 24 hours. At the same time, looking at the TVL of ecosystem projects, there are only a few projects with funding exceeding one million USD.

As a result, many community users have not only collectively accused StarkNet in Discord groups, but also resorted to radical methods like reporting the activities of StarkNet developers to express their dissatisfaction. Regarding this, Maxlion said, “Reporting incidents like this does not cause substantial harm, but future activities will be completely internalized and kept private. Although discussions about airdrops will be more sensitive in the future, everyone in the blockchain ecosystem is here to profit, and the community does not reject profit-seeking. What we reject is the lack of moral boundaries in the process. Community members are individuals with flesh and blood, who are willing to participate in long-term public contributions to StarkNet and contribute to product development. What everyone is more concerned about are long-term opportunities. In the future, the Chinese community will continue to pragmatically engage in translation, development, and advocacy work, and everyone should unite to build StarkNet together.”

Meanwhile, regarding the focus on developer construction of Starknet, he told LianGuaiNews, “The Starknet Foundation and StarkWare have always emphasized developers in their official promotions. In reality, due to the unique nature of the Starknet infrastructure cycle and technical stack, it is necessary to focus on developer construction in various aspects in the long term (L2 consensus, sorter, prover, interpreter, etc.) as well as ecological products. These incentives are also necessary for developers. Although many of the early documents of Starknet (such as sorter and prover, etc.) were launched by the founding team StarkWare, developers have made significant contributions, including taking over the documentation and most of the infrastructure on Starknet, and the frequency and quality of updates have at times been unbearable for the community, with regards to the Starknet development language, Cairo, and the mainnet. Moreover, there are barriers and opportunity costs in the technical development and user experience of Starknet itself, which has led to the retraction of some short-term developers. The atmosphere of the Starknet community developers is also very good, inheriting the cultural spirit of Ethereum, with many Ethereum community leaders, and in the past two years developers have frequently supported many new ecological projects.”

The appeal of multi-stage airdrops and transaction rebates to ordinary users is temporarily limited

Behind the uproar of community users is a greater disappointment in the Starknet airdrop rules, especially among airdrop hunters. Although StarkNet will use 1.8 billion STRK tokens for community rewards, only half of them are primarily aimed at ordinary users, and the airdrops are also conducted in stages.

According to the Starknet Foundation, in order to promote the adoption and development of Starknet, they plan to distribute 1.8 billion STRK tokens as user rewards and transaction rebates. The specific details are still being formulated, and the Foundation will hire various groups or “committees” to oversee the wider distribution of these tokens. The “Reserve Committee” has already allocated 900 million STRK tokens for the fair, decentralized, and transparent distribution of STRK in multiple projects and stages. The goal of this committee is to distribute ownership of the native network token and reward contributions from users and community members in the past and future. At the same time, the official will also allocate an additional 900 million STRK tokens for user rebates, including payment of transaction fees for network users. The planning of this program is still ongoing, and a new committee is being formed to oversee the distribution of STRK and reward important transactions carried out by users on the network.

Although the official rules have not been clearly defined yet, only half of the 1.8 billion STRK tokens designated for community rewards are primarily aimed at ordinary users, and the airdrops are also conducted in stages. According to the latest data from Dune, as of December 14th, the total number of addresses on Starknet has exceeded 1.209 million. This means that in order to provide users with rich airdrop rewards, the official must increase the threshold for screening, which is likely to cause dissatisfaction among many users. However, if they want to adopt a “sunshine for all” rule to satisfy all participating users, it means that the airdrop amount will be greatly reduced, and users may find it difficult to continue using the platform. Even with transaction subsidies, Maxlion believes that the stimulating effect on user participation may be limited until specific rules are established. However, in reality, some ecological projects have also promised to distribute their airdrops to users, but this point is easily overlooked.

Regarding this, some community users believe that this approach by Starknet shows a lack of confidence in the ecosystem and a fear of users dumping the airdrop. However, some users think that this precise airdrop method can alleviate selling pressure and, with many Layer2 solutions yet to launch their tokens, gas subsidies will continue to incentivize user participation.

All in all, for Starknet, which is currently at a disadvantage in the competitive ZK Rollup space, the key is to find a way to stimulate developers to continue building the ecosystem through token economics while retaining and attracting users.

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