\n<\/p>\n
FLR Trades At $500M Market Cap<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Holders of Ripple (XRP), a digital asset designed to serve as a bridge currency for institutions exchanging value between fiat currencies, have begun to receive a long-anticipated windfall.<\/p>\n
Flare Network, an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform, airdropped<\/a> 15% of its FLR token supply to XRP holders based on a snapshot taken on Dec. 12, 2020.\u00a0<\/p>\n The remaining tokens will be airdropped over the next 36 months<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s MKR<\/a> and Curve Finance\u2019s CRV.\u00a0<\/p>\n Flare touts what the project calls a State Connector<\/a>, which allows the blockchain\u2019s 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<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Users who held XRP on major centralized exchanges like Binance, OKX, Kraken, and Bithumb are eligible for the airdrop, according to a post<\/a> from the Flare team. Coinbase is notably missing from the list, though Flare says the distribution will come within the first half of 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n XRP has spiked on the news of the drop \u2014 the token is up nearly 5% in the past 24 hours, according to The Defiant Terminal<\/a>.<\/p>\n XRP Price, Source: The Defiant Terminal<\/a><\/p>\n Flare\u2019s 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<\/a>, while new blockchain architectures<\/a> continue to garner interest.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, airdrops, seen as \u201cfree money\u201d by those in crypto, are almost never met with a lack of enthusiasm.\u00a0<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the first major airdrop from Flare \u2014 in September 2021<\/a>, 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Songbird<\/a> is a so-called \u201ccanary network,\u201d meaning it\u2019s to be used for testing. Unlike testnets, canary networks like Polkadot\u2019s<\/a> Kusama have their own native tokens.\u00a0<\/p>\n To earn a yield, recipients of the FLR airdrop can wrap and delegate<\/a> their tokens to entities which provide data to Flare.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nLayer 1 Fatigue<\/h4>\n