BY KERMAN KOHLI

Compilation: Frost, BlockBeats

Editor's note: encryption researcher KERMAN KOHLI analyzes the success of Starknet's Airdrop from the aspects of Starknet Airdrop Token's application and distribution, data and time.

Following on from my last article about long Airdrop of Optimism, I wanted to take a look at Starknet's Airdrop because I extracted the data at the same time. I hope to look at the two Token Airdrop, Starknet and Optimism, to explore the main differences between Token claim mechanism. The data is now about a month out of date, but considering that the Airdrop was done a few months ago, it won't be too far from the actual number.

Claim & Release Model

The main difference between the two methods is that Optimism says "we will personally deliver the Airdrop to your Wallet", while Starkware says "Come to us to claim your Airdrop". In the case of the former, it is easier for the user and saves gas. My personal philosophy is that if you're doing this on a low-cost on-chain, then cost shouldn't be an issue and a button should be made to claim an airdrop.

With that said, let's take a look at Starknet's Airdrop. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to get data because:

Starknet's analysis of the data after the Airdrop did not publicly report the details of the claim behavior.

Starknet doesn't have a standard EVM format Address, which means I have to hack to get the data available on-chain.

Anyway, here's the official chart about how Airdrops are distributed:

Data Collection

To get the data I need, I basically used:

0x06793d9e6ed7182978454c79270e5b14d2655204ba6565ce9b0aa8a3c3121025 as my Airdrop get Address.

0x00ebc61c7ccf056f04886aac8fd9c87eb4a03d7fdc8a162d7015bec3144c3733 as my starting block hash.

0x04718f5a0fc34cc1af16a1cdee98ffb20c31f5cd61d6ab07201858f4287c938d as the contract from which the balance of the STRK is obtained.

I had to go through longest for loops and byte programming to get some interesting pieces of the data I wanted.

In any case, when it came time to extract the data, I found that only 39.8% of people claimed the Airdrop, and the rest of the users were basically used as marketing data – in a sense, this is also a good result! Some might say it's bad, but if you can get the message across to the widest range of people without giving everything away, then you've found the sweet spot.

Analysis time

The way I do this is to extract all the Addresses that have been Airdropped and then write a script to query the balance of those addresses at that time (i.e. when the script runs). By dividing the balances into "bins", I can see how many balances are distributed in different "boxes". However, due to the limited amount of data available, it is difficult to gain a deeper understanding of these users. Limited data makes the overall analysis more challenging.

Without longing explanation, let's show the results directly! I set a threshold of no higher than 100 STRK, because the minimum Airdrop amount is 111.1 STRK. The distribution of the different amount tiers is listed below:

• StarkEx users: 111.1 STRK per person
• Open Source developers: 111.1 STRK each
• Starknet users: Ranges from 500 to 10,000 STRK with different multipliers
• Starknet Community Members: Ranges from 10,000 to 180,000 STRK
• Starknet developers: 10,000 STRK each
• Ethereum staking pool: 360 STRK per validators
• Single stakes: 1,800 STRK per validator, up to 3,200 STRK for higher risk validators
• Ethereum developers: 1,800 STRK each
• CONCIERGE GUILD MEMBERS: 10,000 STRK PER PERSON
• EIP authors: 2,000 STRK each

Overall, this airdrop did not achieve great results! The retention rate of 13.5% is close to the industry average (and the industry average is actually not high). However, considering that the average GitHub user like me got 1800 STRK, on a deeper level, this Airdrop was longer worse than we expected! Only 1.1% of users who received the Token distribution ended up retaining. Let's look at some other indicators to help us judge if this airdrop was successful.

A simple proxies indicator is the price movement of the Token. Here's a chart of STRK Token's price over the past 3 months:

Prices have fallen by 50%, but the market as a whole has seen a structural correction over the same period. The performance was not ideal, but at least it did not fall by 90%.

Let's look at it from another angle: TVL. At least our friends at Decentralized Finance Llama can help with the job.

TVL rises to around $320 million and then drops to around $210 million, which is pretty good retention. However, we don't know how little Starknet paid to get these numbers long. Luckily I have the numbers. That number is 67,078,250.942674.

If we assume that the average Token price is $1.50, we can rephrase the equation because Starknet spent $100,617,376 acquisition about $300 million in TVL, or in other words, about $3 in STRK Token can buy $1 TVL

My next question is whether the number of users is longest so that we can understand the CAC model of the equation. I redrew the chart above with the percentage of the number of users.

Okay, from here, let's give Starknet a conditional good word, and only consider the "under 100 Tokens" level. Nearly $100 million was spent and 519,282 users were acquired. This means about $200 per user. If we recalculate with retained users (who hold more than 101 Tokens), then the capital consumption for each reserved account will be $1341.

This is lower than what we've seen in Arbitrum Airdrops and other Airdrops with retained CAC up to k or even tens of thousands of dollars. While Starknet's Airdrop isn't great from a reservation standpoint, it's not bad from a CAC standpoint relative to other Airdrops I've seen. My paper is similar to what we saw in the optimistic Airdrop: Token allocation based on longest attribute criteria yields great returns

Ending

Starknet takes a relatively thoughtful approach to how to allocate a large number of tokens to different groups. The data also clearly shows that they ensure the longest of allocation. This is a common characteristic that I have observed Airdrop Airdrop successes and failures.

So, why don't long projects take long Airdrop that takes into account the user's attributes? The reason for this is that collecting, analyzing, and drawing conclusions from data is a very difficult job – especially with large data volumes. However, Starknet uses a relatively simple standard that still ensures longest distribution. In fact, with the right tools, dispensing can be even more long wick candle.