Starknet's STRK Token Rises 10% After Team Reduces Token Unlocking Schedule

According to CoinDesk, Starknet's STRK token saw a 10% increase on Thursday after developer firm StarkWare decided to significantly reduce the number of tokens allocated to the team scheduled to unlock in April. This decision came in response to heavy criticism from the community. Earlier this week, the Ethereum layer-2 project airdropped over 700 million tokens to early users, contributors, and other targeted groups, with additional disclosures that developers and investors might be able to start selling much of their own allocations as early as next month. The market capitalization of the tokens, based on the circulating supply, is currently around $1.44 billion. StarkWare, the primary developer behind Starknet, a layer-2 blockchain atop Ethereum, announced the change in an emailed statement. Under the new schedule, 0.64% of the 10 billion tokens initially minted will unlock on April 15, instead of the planned 13.4% (1.34 billion tokens). The gradual unlock will continue at a pace of 0.64% (64 million tokens) monthly until March 15, 2025, after which it will change to 1.27% (127 million tokens) monthly for the next 24 months until March 15, 2027. According to StarkWare, under the new unlock plan, 580 million tokens held by early contributors and investors will be unlocked by the end of 2024, as opposed to 2 billion of those tokens under the previous schedule. An additional 1.4 billion tokens will be gradually unlocked by the end of 2025, another 1.5 billion will be unlocked by the end of 2026, and 380 million will be unlocked by March 15, 2027. Starknet, developed by StarkWare, is a layer-2 network that utilizes zero-knowledge cryptography, allowing decentralized applications operating on top of it to scale the Ethereum blockchain. It does this by bundling transactions off-chain into a proof that is submitted to Ethereum, which in turn is supposed to process the transaction faster and lower fees for computing them. The token unlocking schedule for the development team and early investors faced criticism from market observers. STRK began trading at $5 earlier this week but quickly fell. At the time of writing, the token was trading at $2.