Flare Tokens Airdropped to XRP Holders After 2 Years, FLR Price Plummets

After a nearly two-year wait, Flare’s FLR tokens were finally distributed to XRP holders starting Monday night in an event that generated an massive amount of chatter among community members. The tokens were dumped almost immediately by recipients.

More than 4.28 billion FLR tokens were shared and distributed to XRP holders who held at least one token during a snapshot in December 2020. The airdrop was conducted on a 1:1 basis, meaning one FLR for every XRP held.

The airdropped tokens now represent 15% of the project’s total supply, with the remaining scheduled to be distributed over the next three years.

FLR holders will be able to vote for the way the future airdrop is distributed on Flare’s governance forums, alongside proposing other changes to the project.

The tokens were priced initially at 5 cents amid low liquidity on the MEXC Global exchange, before tripling to 15 cents as exchanges such as OKX and Kraken joined in and liquidity increased, CoinGecko data shows. The price slumped to as low as 2 cents and was quoted recently at 4 cents on CoinGecko. The tokens amassed $34 million in trading volume as of 10:30 UTC on Tuesday.

Flare, which initially aimed to become a decentralized-finance (DeFi) application that used XRP tokens, has gradually made a transition to a layer 1 blockchain and oracle provider. Layer 1 refers to base blockchains, such as Ethereum or Solana, while oracles are third-party services that fetch data from outside a blockchain to within.

While the token is new, the Flare network was already functioning and handled more than 268 million requests – for data and transactions over the past week, Josh Edwards, vice president of engineering at Flare, said in a Monday tweet.

UPDATE (Jan. 10, 10:35 UTC): Removes percentage drop from headline; adds price detail in fifth paragraph.