<aside> âš™ Please prepare a 15-20 minute presentation, using any materials that you see fit (e.g., slides, Figma, notion, etc.). After you send in your presentation, our team will review it and decide if we want to proceed with an interview. The interview will be 15-20 minutes of presentation followed by 20 minutes of Q&A.
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<aside> đź› Task: Analyze the current sentiment surrounding the recent Starkware airdrop. Assess both its strengths and weaknesses. Do you think it was successful? If Starkware were to deprecate an existing incentive system or make their token non-transferable, how would you construct a messaging strategy to maintain Total Value Locked (TVL) or developer retention? How would this uphold a positive narrative in the community? Additionally, how would you ensure the continued satisfaction of current retail consumers and community members at large? Use presentation materials such as slides, Figma, or Notion to illustrate your approach to the problem.
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Pressure from various stakeholders in our industry leaves little space to consider the intended purpose of airdrops from any first principles: you have investors seeking quick liquidity, early contributors expecting rewards, legions of yield farmers clamoring for allocation, and of course, the core team that may or may not disappear after the airdrop. In other words, it’s worth reminding ourselves of why airdrops exist in the first place:
The first instance of an airdrop as we know it in modern DeFi was the $UNI airdrop in September 2020. It served a critical purpose to reward early users of the Uniswap AMM and had fairly lax criteria for qualification. More importantly, it was the first (and likely last) airdrop where professional farmers could not engage in the protocol with the expectation of a token simply because airdrops had not been introduced to DeFi till then. In other words, the activity that was rewarded with a $UNI airdrop was purely organic. Given this fact, observing the movement of the tokens post-$UNI airdrop offers insight into whether the airdrop was truly successful.
Source for both
Since the airdrop, 93% of recipient wallets entirely dumped $UNI and the number of airdroppers actively trading on Uniswap steadily decreased. Even when a token was airdropped to reward the most organic activity, it did not incentivize any sort of long-term alignment with the protocol.
It’s safe to say that the $UNI was not successful in accomplishing its goals. Unfortunately, other airdrops since have not fared much better. Similar metrics can be observed whether it’s $COMP, $1INCH, or $ENS. Successful airdrops are notoriously difficult and mostly do not achieve their desired outcomes. This context is helpful to bear in mind while looking at the Starkware airdrop.
The $STRK airdrop was six years in the making and presented a major milestone for this L2 ecosystem. In this first phase, they allocated $STRK to nearly 1.3 million wallet addresses.
Here’s how the first round of airdrops (”provisions”) was broken down:
