Stellar Development Foundation: 2 Billion Lumens Airdrop Cancelled

The Stellar Development foundation will not be airdropping 2 billion lumens tokens after all and in our Stellar news today we find out why.

In a blog post yesterday, the Stellar development foundation and Keybase announced they are canceling the airdrop of 2 billion lumens after they got attacked by ‘’hordes’’ of fake accounts and as the blog post noted:

“This month will be our last of the Stellar Space Drop. On the week starting Dec. 15, we will distribute the final 100 million Lumens among all qualifying members.”

Back in September, Stellar unveiled its largest airdrop to date with about $120 million at the time and the Stellar Development Foundation partnered with Keybase which is a file-sharing application that was willing to distribute the funds over the course of 20 months to verified users on the platform. Each user that was verified was eligible for up to $500 in XLM. Both Stellar and Keybase received a lot of press from the promotion and Stellar even received coverage from almost every major publication while Keybase gained thousands of new users signing in thus growing its user base by a quarter.

Keybase claims that the fake sign-ups overwhelmed their capacity to verify the accounts and therefore they had to shut down. Although they say that the campaign ‘’ mostly worked’’ the cancellation of the airdrop will have a serious impact on the users who feel that were duped. That said, the Stellar Development Foundation said that it ‘’reserves the right to end this giveaway early’’ from the beginning of the promotion.

After promising to give away 2 billion in XLM, the foundation’s remaining treasury will still represent more than 30 percent of the total token supply which is a major point of centralization.  As per the reports, The Cardano chief Charles Hoskinson recently had a chance to talk about the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) and its recent decision to burn 55 million XLM tokens which were worth around $4 billion at the time. Hoskinson noted that this move has created little in the way of value for Stellar’s foundation and noted that the funds should have been invested in development. However, the token has gone into a mode of suffering along with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies which are deep in the red today during the most recent price tumble.