Today is one of those days where airdrop hunting can bite you in the ***. You know how it is always advised that airdrop is highly risky because no reward is promised until given, I had my fair share of that with starknet today. Let me give you a little story of my experience with starknet so you can learn about the disadvantages of airdrop hunting.
I decided to start my airdrop hunting in 2022 and starknet was one of the projects I started hunting, I started hunting starknet during their testent phase. Their technology is one of the slowest, transaction takes over 10 minutes to approve, gas fee was high. They launched their mainnet and it was the same, I bridged over $50 to try the mainnet, besides, I don’t know what their eligibility criteria will come from. For instance, Arbitrum gave airdrop to people who bridged, so I thought that might be valid consideration for future airdrops.
After bridging, I started doing a lot of starknet tasks, in the beginning it took over 10 minutes for starknet transactions to get approved just like the testnet. Transaction fee was extremely high, cost a lot to transact, but I paid them any ways. Bought a 5 years starknet domain name. Lots of tasks and quests were launched, I did more than 80% of them. Unlike other wallets where you can use the same seed phrase to access any EVM wallet, starknet was different. They were only two wallets, Braavos and Argent X, Braavos tasks required Braavos wallet, Argent X tasks required Argent X Wallet. This meant that I had to pay gas fees and do tasks on two separate wallets and these tasks were not cheap. They cost a lot in gas fees.
I was so sure that I was going to meet the eligibility criteria because airdrop eligibility mirror sites said so. They mirrored eligibility crieteria of other airdrops to predict starknet. Unfortunately starkenet eligibility launched today and I wasn’t eligibility. I got 0 tokens, because their eligibility criteria was brutal, they needed wallets that have used starknet dapps and had 0.05 ETH in their wallet before snapshot. I could have been eligible with the at criteria but I didn’t have up to 0.05 ETH in my wallet. The other criteria was for developers, GitHub contributors and early Ethereum users. Outrageous criteria, I was qualified due to this criteria, being part of the starknet community and watching the project neglect my contribution and effort put into their project, I felt really bad. All the money I spent farming this airdrop got wasted.
This is just one of those airdrops that weren’t worth it, but in the past we have seen a lot of airdrops reward community for their efforts fairly. It’s a risk I took and this is part of the game, sometimes you win some and lose some, you never know. We dont know anything, we are all trying our best, its risky, nothing is promised.