At the beginning of November, wallet provider Blockchain.com announced an airdrop of Stellar Lumens tokens worth the equivalent of 125 million US dollars. An airdrop is essentially a donation of free coins to users of crypto currencies. The blockchain.com started to distribute the crypto currency to millions of users. Each of these users receives a gift of Stellar worth about 25 US dollars. The whole process will take several months and the amount of Stellar distributed to individual users will vary depending on the region. The Blockchain Airdrop is considered to be the largest of its kind ever. The occasion was the introduction of Stellar in the Blockchain Wallet.
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Effects of the Airdrop on the price of Stellar
The idea for the Airdrop was probably not only to celebrate the introduction of the Stellar Lumens currency at Blockchain, but also to increase users’ interest in the Stellar Lumens (XLM) currency in general and to encourage them to continue buying Stellar. In the end, one reason was probably the increase in Stellar’s exchange rate. But was this successful? A look at the share price performance provides clarification:
On November 6th, the day of the announcement of the Airdrop on the Blockchain blog, the Stellar price was about 0.2511 USD. At that time, the price was already in an upward leading curve. Perhaps triggered by the news, it jumped briefly the day after the announcement to 0.2643 USD and then fell slightly the next day to around 0.22 euros (0.2481 USD).
Fluctuations, a High and a Decline
With slight fluctuations, however, the price continued to climb and reached a high of USD 0.2798 on 12 November 2018. Although the crypto currency was distributed on the first day of the announcement, the price fell afterwards and has continued to fall since then with a few exceptions. On the 25th, it reached a low of 0.1333 USD, then recovered briefly to 0.1589 USD and on the 27th it is back at about 0.12 Euro (0.1356 USD). According to CoinGecko, the XLM price has fallen by 38.6 % in the last 30 days (as of 27.11.2018). Over the course of a year, however, the price has risen by 136.2 %, which in turn offers reason for hope.
“Stellar has a superior blockchain,” says Blockchain CEO
The Stellar Lumens currency is currently the sixth largest crypto currency in the world by market capitalization. Its market capitalization is just under USD 3 billion. One reason for the collaboration between Blockchain and Stellar is the confidence that it is a superior Blockchain that can handle a very large number of transactions, Peter Smith, CEO of Blockchain, told Fortune. Stellar was developed by Jed McCaleb, who was also responsible for the development of Ripple. The Airdrop runs through the Wallet Blockchain, but is paid by Stellar alone. Stellar wants to use the wallets of about 30 million Blockchain users for this.
