FLR Trades At $500M Market Cap

Holders of Ripple (XRP), a digital asset designed to facilitate cross-border payments, have begun to receive a long-anticipated windfall.

Flare Network, an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform, airdropped 15% of its FLR token supply to XRP holders based on a snapshot taken on Dec. 12, 2020. 

The remaining tokens will be airdropped over the next 36 months.

External Sources

FLR is up almost 12% in the last 24 hours and already has a market capitalization of over $500M, according to CoinGecko. That puts the token ahead of established DeFi tokens like MakerDAO’s MKR and Curve Finance’s CRV. 

Flare touts what the project calls a State Connector, which allows the blockchain’s smart contracts to process information from external sources like other chains and the broader web, as a key differentiator. At a high level, State Connectors perform a similar task as decentralized oracles, the most well-known provider of which is Chainlink. 

Users who held XRP on major centralized exchanges like Binance, OKX, Kraken, and Bithumb are eligible for the airdrop, according to a post from the Flare team. Coinbase is notably missing from the list, though Flare says the distribution will come within the first half of 2023. 

XRP has spiked on the news of the drop — the token is up nearly 5% in the past 24 hours, according to The Defiant Terminal.

XRP Price, Source: The Defiant Terminal

Layer 1 Fatigue

Flare’s launch comes at a time when a degree of fatigue for new smart contract platforms has set in. Aptos, one such much-hyped platform, launched last year with minimal fanfare, while new blockchain architectures continue to garner interest. 

Still, airdrops, seen as “free money” by those in crypto, are almost never met with a lack of enthusiasm. 

This isn’t the first major airdrop from Flare — in September 2021, the organization announced an airdrop of 30% of the supply of Songbird tokens, the native asset of the blockchain network by the same name, to XRP holders. 

Songbird is a so-called “canary network,” meaning it’s to be used for testing. Unlike testnets, canary networks like Polkadot’s Kusama have their own native tokens. 

To earn a yield, recipients of the FLR airdrop can wrap and delegate their tokens to entities which provide data to Flare.