December 12 will see an airdop of 45 billion spark tokens at a 1:1 ratio to XRP holders by blockchain platform Flare Network, which is backed by Ripple's investment arm RippleX (formerly Xpring) - so let's take a look at what that means.
Spark is the native token of the Flare Network, created by a utility fork of XRP, with the network aiming to bring functionality similar to Ethereum (ETH) to the XRP Ledger, as it integrates Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Per a late November post, an element of utility to network is the bridging of value to Flare in the form of F-Assets, such as FXRP, adding that "the "best people" to provide capital to underpin the trustless issuance of FXRP are XRP holders, while "the only way to achieve this fairly" is the distribution of spark.
Flare is creating 100bn spark tokens, which will be distributed as they become available, with another post stating that the network is excepted to go live in Q1-Q2 2021. Each account that claimed spark should receive 15% of the total spark for which they are eligible at launch, and the rest should be distributed over a minimum of 25 months and a maximum of 34 months, after which any remaining undistributed spark is burned or distributed based on a governance vote.
How many spark one's eligible to claim depends on the participation of exchanges, said the post. According to Flare's website, 68 exchanges currently support the airdrop, including major players such as Binance, Kraken, Huobi, KuCoin, Nexo, Gate.io, eToro, BitPay, Bitfinex, and others. Coinbase announced yesterday that it plans to support Flare Network’s upcoming airdrop as well.
Also, 5 wallets are allowing the spark token claim, while 5 more are allowing the claim and will support the spark token.
A 1bn XRP cap, aka 'the Whale cap', is set on any group of XRP accounts known to belong to the same individual, so that an individual can't use more than XRP 1bn to claim spark.
If a user self custodies, the system will deliver Spark to the Flare address with which they claimed, and the user can claim spark by June 11, 2021. Otherwise, a participating exchange will distribute the token to users' accounts.
Meanwhile, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse recently said that Flare's effort with spark is interesting and "really distinct from what Ripple is doing," adding that it doesn't affect RippleNet customers and how Ripple's using ODL (On-Demand
Liquidity).
At the time of writing (14.12.2020) XRP is trading at USD 0,50,having gone up 2.6% in a day and nearly 1% in a week. Overall, it appreciated 132.6% in a month.
By Sead Fadilpašić