StarkWare has decided to delay its inaugural token release by at least five months, now set for mid-April 2024. This first release is primarily intended for the firm's primary contributors, initial backers, and staff members. Having debuted on the Ethereum platform in November 2022, STRK originally had a lockup period of four years intended for stakeholders, workforce, and developers, with an initial release planned for November 2023. STRK's primary functions will include facilitating transaction payments, overseeing governance, and staking within the StarkNet system. Following a successful $100 million Series D investment round in May 2022, led jointly by Greenoaks Capital and Coatue, StarkWare's valuation skyrocketed to $8 billion.
Previously, on July 13th, 2022, Starkware announced in a Medium post that StarkNet would have its native token and a StarkNet foundation would be set up. The StarkNet Foundation will be a non-profit organization, and StarkNet tokens will be allocated to it to help achieve its goals. Its primary goal will be to maintain StarkNet as a public good. The Foundation will also maintain ongoing protocol development, testing, documentation, and software publication.
The StarkNet Foundation and its native token will play a key role in making the StarkNet network decentralized. The StarkNet Foundation will follow these four principles to maintain StarkNet’s decentralization: Livness, Censorship resistance, Transparency, and Creativity.
On November 10th, 2022, Starkware announced StarkNet Foundation’s official launch. Foundation priorities will be making StarkNet more decentralized by developing a governance mechanism and making the process of sequencing and proving decentralized. Additionally, this will include overseeing the continued development of the StarkNet network, fostering a community of users and developers, educating people about StarkNet and its technology, and helping developers gain the skill to maintain and build dApps on StarkNet as well as StarkNet infrastructure.
A seven-member board will govern the StarkNet Foundation, whose members come from diverse backgrounds and bring a multidisciplinary range of skills.
The board members are Andrew McLaughlin, Prof. Eli Ben-Sasson, Eric Wall, Heather Meeker, Prof Shubhangi Saraf, Tomasz Stanczak, and Uri Kolodny.
StarkNet Token
StarkNet token will be used for three purposes (payment, staking, governance):
1) Network payment - Paying network transaction fees. For a good user experience, users will also have the choice to pay in ETH.
2) Staking - Various services will require staking StarkNet tokens. As for reaching a temporary consensus on the validity of layer 2 transactions before L1 finality’s reached, data availability service, a permissionless Proof-of-Stake leader election mechanism, will be implemented for sequencing and proving STARK-compressed transactions.
3) Governance - Governance decisions regarding starknet operations and updates will be taken by token holders. A minimum voting threshold will be required to pass a governance proposal. Token holders will be able to vote directly or via delegation.
The StarkNet token’s design was made considering the needs of:
1. Users of the network.
2. Operators providing computing resources for various operations, such as sequencing transactions, STARK proof generation, and storage for data availability services.
3. Developers building and maintaining software for the infrastructure of the network and dApps built on top of it.
Starkware minted 10 billion tokens off-chain but, as of November 2022, has deployed the token contract on Ethereum. New tokens will be minted, so the circulating supply of tokens will increase over time. New minting of tokens and a portion of transaction fees paid by users will go to smart contract developers and core developers.
However, the StarkNet protocol may automatically distribute a portion of fees and new minting of tokens to smart contract developers according to the value their smart contracts provide to users. The exact mechanism for distribution has yet to be confirmed.
Initial allocation of StarkNet token
32% - Core contributors (Starkware employees and consultants and StarkNet software developer partners)
17% - StarkNet investors, such as Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management, Pantera Capital, IOSG ventures, etc.
50.1% of the token allocation for the StarkNet Foundation will be distributed as follows:
Community Provisions (9%)
To people who performed work for StarkNet and developed its underlying technology and infrastructure and to past StarkEx users. Allocations will be done based on verifiable usage of StarkEx’s technology before June 1, 2022.
To prevent gamification, snapshots from before the announcement date of the token rewards will be referred to distribute tokens, and additional network usage filtering will be done so that airdrop Sybil hunters don’t receive rewards.
Community Rebates (9%)
Rebates in StarkNet Tokens will be done to partially cover the costs of onboarding users to StarkNet from Ethereum. To prevent gamification, community rebates will apply to transactions after the rebate mechanism is announced by the StarkNet Foundation.
12% — Grants for research and work done to develop and maintain the StarkNet protocol.
10% — Strategic reserve will be distributed as ecosystem rewards for the activities that align with the foundation’s mission.
2% — Donations to highly regarded institutions and organizations, such as universities, NGOs, etc., will be decided by StarkNet token holders and the foundation through governance.
8.1% — Unallocated – Foundation’s unallocated treasury tokens will be distributed through governance for the purpose of supporting the StarkNet community.
Tokens allocated to core contributors and investors will be subjected to a four-year lock-up period with the linear release of tokens after a one-year cliff. The vesting schedule for tokens set aside for the StarkNet Foundation has yet to be announced.
