STRK Tokens Claimed Hit 420M in a Day as On-Chain Metrics Soar

Robust demand for Starknet's newly released starknet (STRK) tokens means a full 71% of those available were snapped up in the first 24 hours after the mammoth airdrop went live.

More than 490,000 individual users claimed 420 million tokens, Tokenflow data show, and while the price slumped to $1.77 from a debut high of $5, funding rates in the futures market are positive – a sign of bullish sentiment in the market.

STRK is the native token of Starknet, a layer-2 network that aims to use zero-knowledge cryptography to scale the Ethereum blockchain by bundling transactions off-chain, reducing fees and speeding up transactions. The token demand compares with the roughly 55% claimed in the first eight hours of Jupiter's massive airdrop in January and Arbitrum's 77% first-day takeup in March last year.

Daily transactions on Starknet hit a record high of 1.06 million on Tuesday, with 45.2 transactions per second being recorded at the height of the airdrop claim frenzy, data from voyager.online shows. By that measure, Starknet beat other layer-2 networks Arbitrum and Optimism, which reached 874,000 and 486,000, respectively.

Another way to gauge network activity is to examine Cario, the native smart-contract language of Starknet. Cario steps measures the number of computational steps that occur on the blockchain within a certain time period. On Tuesday, Starknet recorded 7.8 billion cario steps, on par with a record high set in November.

Trading volume over the past 24 hours is at $1.6 billion. Open interest, which measures the nominal value of all open derivatives positions, soared beyond $150 million, according to CoinGlass.

Funding rates on Bybit are positive by 9 basis points, a signal that futures traders are leaning bullish on STRK despite heavy spot demand caused by airdrop claimants liquidating their positions.

In terms of liquidations, traders have already notched up more than $7 million in liquidated positions across both long and short trades, and the token remains volatile despite high levels of liquidity on exchanges like Binance. Usually, higher levels of liquidity are reflected in lower volatility.

The 2% market depth on Binance, which measures the amount of capital required to move a token by 2% in either direction, is between $1.38 million and $1.53 million, according to CoinMaketCap.

In terms of total value locked (TVL) on Starknet, the figure of $56 million has remained relatively unchanged, though it's increased from $40 million since Feb. 1, according to DefiLlama.