Here’s How to Prepare for $125 Million Stellar (XLM) Airdrop For Blockchain Wallet Users

Blockchain Wallet Users – Get Ready for $125 Million Stellar Airdrop!

The Stellar Development Foundation is a non-profit organization that most people know as being the creators of the Stellar token and platform. It seems that they want to offer more to their users through an airdrop, celebrating their new collaboration with Blockchain. The airdrop will be worth $125 million in Stellar lumens (XLM), and it will be exclusively offered to members of Blockchain.

Reported by The Block on November 6^th, the first release of lumens is scheduled for this week, but the users are required to sign up to participate. Optimally, Stellar wants around 30 million wallets to be involved, pushing their adoption against other cryptocurrencies. Airdrops are a common way to elicit this type of attention in the market, pushing towards better development. Stellar’s airdrop in particular will be the largest in the history of the crypto market. The only one that comes close to it is Dfinity’s airdrop, which happened in June and was worth $35 million.

The reason that Blockchain seems to have chosen Stellar as their first partner in the airdrop program seems to be due to its scalability structure and its “active and growing ecosystem,” according to Blockchain CEO Peter Smith. Smith believes that this event will show how they prioritize users, adding,

“Looking back at the last five years of crypto, one of my favorite things has been giving users their first $20 of crypto and watching them realize the power of a new financial system in their hand as they saw their first transaction. But you can only do this for so many people in that fashion. The genesis of this project was; how do we help millions of people make their first transaction?”

The co-founder of Stellar, Jed McCaleb, said,

“We believe that airdrops are central to creating a more inclusive digital economy. Giving away lumens for free is an invitation to communities to design the services they need. By working with Blockchain to increase availability and active use of lumens on the network, we will increase the network’s utility by many orders of magnitude.”

McCaleb is also responsible for founding Mt Gox and co-founding Ripple.

Rather than using Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) to bring in users, airdrops are quickly becoming “an attractive alternative,” according to The Block. However, one of the concerns seems to be that these coin releases are somehow sneaking around the securities laws that the SEC has in place.

Blockchain is pulling its weight equivalently in this collaboration. Along with their partnership to allow Stellar to launch the airdrop, they are also looking to improve the adoption that the Stellar Lumens have in the marketplace, including other initiatives to move it along. They are working with charity: water, Stanford d.school, code.org, Network for Good, and IBM. Though the full details are not available right now, The Block reports that additional information will be available in the “coming weeks.”

When Stellar was originally created, they established 100 billion lumens. At the time, the Stellar Development Foundation decided to distribute 95 billion lumens in the following way:

• 50% to be distributed with the Direct Sign-Up Program
• 25% to be distributed with the Partnership Program
• 20% to be distributed with the Bitcoin Program
• 5% to be held by the Foundation to help with the cost of operation

Developers and partners were also recipients of Lumens. Right now, The Block reported at press time that 19 billion lumens presently exist in circulation, while the 104 billion exist as the total supply. The reason for the high numbers seems to be due to the built-in inflation at 1% annually. In June 2017, Stellar airdropped a large number of Lumens to Bitcoin holders. Right now, the top 100 holders of lumen are controlling 94.5% of the circulating tokens. In comparison with other leading cryptocurrencies, the top 100 holders of XRP control 81%, while 19% of Bitcoin and 34% of Ethereum are controlled by the top 100 holders.

By performing the airdrop at all, 490 million lumens would be removed from the “SDF World Giveaway” wallet, which presently holds over 44 billion tokens. The airdrop is only about 2.6% of the total circulating lumens, which makes investors wonder how much this will help with the distribution of XLM tokens.