Starknet, an Ethereum layer-2 solution, recently made headlines with its airdrop event, which attracted high demand and controversy, pushing its market cap over a staggering $20 billion. On February 20, Starknet released around 700 million STRK tokens, part of a 10 billion total supply, aiming to reward a wide array of contributors including Ethereum stakers, developers, and even those outside the Web3 ecosystem. Remarkably, 45 million STRK tokens were snapped up within the first hour and a half, with claims now exceeding 220 million tokens.

Participants have until June 20, 2024, to claim their share, amidst a backdrop of fluctuating STRK token prices—dropping from an initial $7 to $2 on Binance—yet the protocol's valuation remains impressively high with a total locked value of $57 million.

Controversy erupted when Yearn Finance developer Banteg highlighted that the airdrop included squatters—individuals aiming to profit from multiple claims using dubious methods. Despite previous alerts, around 701,544 of the 1.3 million eligible wallets were suspected of being linked to these airdrop hunters. These hunters often employ sophisticated scripts to consolidate numerous addresses into a few, maximizing their gains from such events. This issue is not unique to Starknet; a similar situation occurred with the Arbitrum airdrop last March, where $3.3 million in tokens were funneled from nearly 1,500 wallets into just two.

Despite these challenges, Starknet's airdrop is considered a massive success, highlighting both the immense interest in Ethereum's scaling solutions and the ongoing issues with airdrop hunters in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. As the community and developers navigate these controversies, Starknet's place at the forefront of the crypto conversation is undeniably secure, promising an intriguing future for its stakeholders.