Flare to XRP Airdrop Ratio Announced

After slumbering for a while, Ripple’s XRP token finally rose in price since the start of December in anticipation of the long-awaited Spark (FLR) airdrop.

Holders needed to have their tokens on a participating cryptocurrency exchange or wallet in order to receive the airdrop.

How Much Flare Do You Get?

In a blog post, Flare said that it would issue about 46 million FLR tokens to people who held XRP during the December 11, 2020 snapshot.

Co-founder and CEO Hugo Philion explained via the post how the number of tokens was worked out. The ratio is a relatively simple 1 XRP: 1.0073 FLR tokens. The process of figuring this out is a little more complicated, however.

The formula essentially calculates the amount of XRP that is eligible for the free airdrop, then divides that by the participants. XRP Ripple are tokens owned by the Ripple corporation while XRP NPE are tokens held on exchanges but not eligible for the FLR airdrop.

The total equated to: 99,990,822,918

• XRP Ripple: 54,172,271,587
• And non-participating exchange ripple (NPE): 322,744.698

What’s the Point of an Airdrop?

In this case, part of the reason to give away free tokens is to get people to pay attention to the coin. XRP has more or less remained the #3 non-stablecoin cryptocurrency by market cap. Therefore, this airdrop appears to be getting a lot of attention.

However, Ripple has a large share of non-participating or corporate clients. According to some statistics, about 66% of XRP is owned by the top 100 accounts.

This number doesn’t represent the number of holders eligible for the drop, as exchanges may have many clients. And some clients may be Ripple staff or otherwise ineligible. Still, not everyone who holds XRP will receive FLR.

XRP: Who Participated

Luckily for most who kept XRP on exchanges, major platforms did support the airdrop. Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance all took part.

Some wallets like Ledger also participated (though users should double-check). When the tokens arrive, people with those wallets should receive their FLR.

Independent XRP wallet holders, however, may have to claim their FLR from Flare Networks. Further instructions can be found here.

Nearly 45% of all (100 billion) FLR that will be created is part of this airdrop. Spark will eventually have its own blockchain, scheduled for next year. The value of the tokens is currently unknown.

Flare Networks was created to interact with XRP, and the utility is a little complicated. Basically, Flare aims to allow other assets to use the XRP blockchain. For example, Flare could be used to interact with Ethereum smart contracts.

Participants should get their FLR tokens when the network goes live (estimated to be in early 2021).