Starknet's STRK token surged as much as 10% on Thursday after developer StarkWare agreed to significantly reduce the number of tokens allocated to the pool scheduled to unlock in April, following heavy criticism from the community.
The statement comes after the Layer 2 Ethereum project this week floated more than 700 million tokens to early adopters, contributors and other target groups, along with additional revelations that the Developers and investors can start selling the majority of their own allocations as soon as possible. the next month. The token's market capitalization, based on circulating supply, currently stands at approximately $1.44 billion.
According to an emailed statement: “After listening to feedback from our friends and collaborators in the ecosystem, we are changing the lock-up schedule for StarkWare contributors and early investors to done gradually". StarkWare is the main developer behind Starknet, the layer 2 blockchain on Ethereum.
Under the new schedule, 0.64% of the 10 billion initially minted tokens will unlock on April 15, instead of the planned 13.4% (1.34 billion tokens), according to the statement.
“The gradual unlocking will continue at a rate of 0.64% (64 million tokens) monthly until March 15, 2025, after which it will change to 1.27% (127 million tokens) ) monthly for the next 24 months until March 15, 2027,” StarkWare said.
According to StarkWare, “Under the new unlock plan, 580 million tokens held by early contributors and investors will be unlocked by the end of 2024, as opposed to 2 billion of those tokens under the previous schedule.” “An additional 1.4 billion tokens will be unlocked gradually by the end of 2025, another 1.5 billion tokens will be unlocked by the end of 2026, and 380 million will be unlocked by March 15, 2027.”
Starknet, developed by the development company StarkWare, is a layer 2 network that uses zero-knowledge cryptography, allowing decentralized applications operating on it to scale the Ethereum blockchain. It does this by wrapping off-chain transactions into a proof that is sent to Ethereum, which in turn is said to process transactions faster and reduce the fees for calculating them.
Starknet's token unlocking schedule for the development team and early investors has drawn criticism from market observers. STRK began trading at $5 earlier this week, then quickly declined. At press time, the token was changing hands at $2.