Ethereum Scaling Solution StarkNet Announces Token Launch for September

The Israel-based team behind StarkWare has taken another step towards decentralization: The launch of a native token.

According to details seen by Decrypt, the token is part of a two-pronged agenda to become a "public good like Ethereum or the Internet." The second aspect of today's announcement revolves around the launch of the StarkNet Foundation, a non-profit organization.

The StarkNet Foundation will see to it that the technology is stewarded towards its goal of wide adoption.

StarkNet is the name of the layer-2 scaling technology for Ethereum and StarkWare is the development team building it. The technology itself leverages rollup technology to improve the network's scalability.

As for the token, it will serve three purposes: To pay transaction fees on StarkNet, to serve as a governance token, as well as to support the technology's consensus mechanism.

There will be an initial 10 billion tokens minted, of which contributors such as the development team's investors (17%), development partners and employees (32.9%), and to the foundation (50.1%).

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The token is expected to go live on Ethereum this September. It's unclear when members of the broader StarkNet community will receive an allocation of the token. Documents seen by Decrypt do, however, indicate that the launch "will filter and exclude usage that is deemed by to be an abuse and gamification of the network."

During hyped airdrop events, users will often create multiple wallets, and execute a variety of operations with the protocol in question, all in hopes of raking in a much larger allocation than a single wallet.

StarkNet token hint

The token launch came just a day after Zhu Su, a co-founder of the troubled crypto fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC), suggested that a token was in the works prior to the announcement.

3AC has been throttled by the recent crypto crash, and was recently ordered to liquidate all assets by a court in the British Virgin Islands.

As part of that order, Su has been embroiled with liquidators with some reports indicating that he and another co-founder, Kyle Davies, were not cooperating with the liquidators. A July 8 filing from the firm's liquidators also suggested that the two founders' whereabouts "are currently unknown."