Behind the "riot" in the Starknet community: the batch airdrop caused dissatisfaction among users and was accused of "favoring" developers

By Nancy, PANews

StarkNet, ETH’s Layer2 scaling solution, is about to issue coins, but it caused trouble because of the airdrop.

Recently, StarkNet has been abused by community users because of its incentive program, and the reporting of developer activities has also caused a lot of uproar. In the eyes of the community, StarkNet’s multi-stage airdrop not only “anti-smacked” users, but also aroused public anger because of its “favoritism” towards developers. PANews caught up with Maxlion, founder of Starknet Astro, Chinese developer community, to find out what the airdrop was to be felt within the community.

Reward developers with real money from users?

The StarkNet Foundation has announced a number of incentive programs, why are developers being put on the cusp?

StarkNet has launched several developer support programs. For example, in October of this year, Starknet announced the distribution of 50 million STRK tokens to early ecosystem contributors, which will reward individual contributors who encourage technical discussions, organize Starknet-related events, and regularly publish Starknet-branded content. On December 8, Starknet once again revealed that it will initially allocate 50 million STRK to encourage activity in DeFi protocols within the network, with the goal of increasing the liquidity, trading volume, and overall growth of DeFi on Starknet to explore direct, indirect, and retroactive incentives for DeFi protocol activity, which will be put into execution and deployment in the first quarter of 2024.

According to StarkNet’s token economic model, the total amount of STRK is 10 billion, of which 12% is used for developer incentives. The importance of ecology to project development is self-evident, and they usually support their own projects through financial incentives, but community users do not recognize StarkNet’s official project support practices.

In particular, the “devonomics” program announced by Starknet officially intends to allocate 10% of all transaction operator fees accumulated since its launch in November 2022 (totaling 1,600 ETH, more than $3.5 million) to developers building on Starknet, of which 8% will be allocated to DApp developers and 2% to core developers. In this regard, Diego Oliv, CEO of the Starknet Foundation, also said that the plan can directly distribute tokens to builders who build Starknet DApps and infrastructure, and will effectively promote the expansion of the Starknet ecosystem.

In the eyes of community users, in the past two years of development, Starknet has not yet had a resistant ecological project, but it has “taken special care” of developers and rewarded developers with real money contributed by users instead of users. According to L2BEZAT data, Starknet’s TVL is about $140 million, lagging behind many other Layer 2 projects, and has fallen by 11% in the past 24 hours. At the same time, looking at the TVL of ecological projects, projects with funding of more than one million dollars are in the single digits.

For this reason, many community users not only collectively criticized in the Disdcord group, but also adopted radical methods such as reporting Starknet developer activities to express their dissatisfaction. In response, Maxlion said, “This is a move to report the incident and cause substantial harm, but future activities will be completely internalized and private.” Although the future will be more sensitive to the discussion of airdrops, the various ecological roles on the blockchain are not fluffing, and the community does not reject fluffing, but excludes requests without a moral bottom line. The community members are all flesh-and-blood developers and ecosystem builders who are willing to participate in Starknet’s public contribution and build products for a long time, and everyone is more concerned about some long-term opportunities. ”

At the same time, regarding Starknet’s focus on developer building, he told PANews, "The Starknet Foundation and StarkWare have always made it clear that developers are the center in their official publicity. In fact, due to the particularity of Starknet’s infrastructure cycle and technology stack, it must focus on developers to build long-term infrastructure (L2 consensus, sequencers, provers, interpreters, etc.) and ecological products. These incentives are also necessary for developers, and while much of Starknet’s early documentation (such as sequencers and provers) was introduced by the founding team StarkWare, developers have made a lot of contributions, including taking over the documentation and most of the infrastructure on Starknet, as well as Cairo, the Starknet development language, and mainnet, which were once unbearable for the community in terms of frequency and quality of updates. Not only that, there are thresholds and opportunity costs in Starknet’s own technical development and user experience, and some short-term developers are reversely screened. The Starknet community developer atmosphere is also very good, the cultural spirit has inherited the ETH Fang, there are many ETH Fang community leaders, and in the past two years, developers have often supported many new ecological projects. ”

Ordinary users will be airdropped in multiple stages, and the attractiveness of trading rebates is temporarily limited

Behind the community user fryer, there is more disappointment with Starknet’s airdrop rules, especially the airdrop hunter (wool party). Although StarkNet uses 1.8 billion STRK for community rewards, only half of them are mainly for ordinary users, and the airdrop is still carried out in stages.

According to the Starknet Foundation, in order to promote the adoption and growth of Starknet, it plans to distribute 1.8 billion STRK tokens as user rewards and trading rebates, the details are still being worked out, and the foundation will hire various groups or “committees” to oversee the wider distribution of these tokens. The Provisioning Committee has allocated 900 million STRK for the fair, decentralized and transparent distribution of STRK across multiple projects and phases, with the goal of distributing ownership of the network’s native token and rewarding users and community members for past and future contributions, as well as an additional 900 million STRK for user rebates, including payment of transaction fees for network users. Planning for the program is still ongoing, and a new committee is being formed to oversee the distribution of STRK to reward users for important transactions made on the network.

Although the official rules have not yet been clarified, only half of the 1.8 billion STRK used for community rewards are mainly for ordinary users, and the airdrop is still carried out in stages. According to Dune’s latest data, as of December 14, the total number of Starknet addresses exceeded 1.209 million. This means that if the official wants to provide users with rich airdrop returns, the screening threshold must be raised, which will inevitably cause dissatisfaction among many users. However, if the “sun shines” rule is adopted to satisfy all participating users, it means that the amount of airdrop will be significantly reduced, and it may be difficult for users to continue to use it. Even with transaction subsidies, Maxlion believes that there may be limited incentives for users to participate until specific rules come out. But in fact, some ecological projects also promise to distribute their airdrops to users, but this is easy to ignore.

In this regard, some community users believe that Starknet’s method is not confident in the ecology, and they are afraid that users will lose after getting the airdrop. However, some users believe that this refined airdrop method can alleviate the pressure of smashing the market, and in the case that many Layer 2s have not yet issued coins, the gas subsidy will also provide impetus for users to continue to participate.

In general, for Starknet, which is temporarily at a disadvantage in the ecosystem, how to retain and continuously attract users to use ZK Rollup while using the token economy to stimulate developers to continue to build the ecosystem is the key.