Coinbase will support an upcoming airdrop that will send free crypto to all XRP holders. The organization issuing the airdrop said last week that Coinbase was too late, but it seems as though Coinbase has joined just in time. The airdrop is also sponsored by many other exchanges.
Coinbase Confirms it Will Honor the Spark Airdrop
Coinbase confirmed Saturday that it would support the new Spark airdrop for XRP holders. In the past weeks the airdrop may have been a factor in the rise of XRP’s price.
The exchange in San Francisco reported in a blog post that Coinbase customers with XRP holdings would collect Spark tokens from Coinbase at a later date from midnight at UTC on 12 December 2020.
Coinbase will support @FlareNetworks’ Spark airdrop. Customers in approved jurisdictions who hold XRP in their accounts on the snapshot date of Dec. 12 will qualify to receive Spark tokens. We plan to distribute the airdrop after the Flare network launch. https://t.co/jEYKH1n4XB
— Coinbase (@coinbase) December 6, 2020
According to Coinbase’s blog:
The amount of Spark you’ll receive depends on how much XRP you had in your account at the snapshot time. Sends and receives will be disabled before the snapshot time and resume shortly after the snapshot is complete. Additional information about the airdrop will be available in the coming days.
Spark is the native token of the Flare Network, a framework designed to supply the XRP Ledger with Ethereum-like functions. According to CoinDesk numbers, XRP has risen by almost 10 percent over the last 24 hours.
What is Spark Network?
Spark Network hopes to solve problems inherent in the proof of stake consensus protocol. The immediate problem inherent in Proof of Stake is that alternative uses of the native token are not yet securely allowed by the consensus architecture.
If a token buyer may achieve a better yield by supplying leverage to build a secure coin than they can by staking (and with little risk of slashing), so they would certainly do so as logical users. This takes away from staking tokens and cannibalizes the network’s protection.
This is perhaps the main explanation why Ethereum still leads the way in DeFi, despite having comparatively higher transaction costs and much lower transaction throughput.
A longer-term concern is that the valuation of the stake token must rise or the network will become unsafe when a Proof of Stake network achieves use and the value constructed on top of it rises. This is excellent for token investors, but poor for individuals who wish to see decentralization becoming part of the mainstream way of doing business.
Since capital must be redirected from any other usage to acquire the token in order for the token worth that secures the network to increase.
Taken to the logical endpoint, if smart contract networks utilizing proof of interest were to become the ubiquitous way of doing business, the scale of capital diversion needed from other endeavors will render the cost of exchange unfeasibly large, only to protect the value created on these networks.
It is highly doubtful that it would happen for this cause. Stake proof and variants will scale the performance of transactions, but current solutions can not scale for value. proof of stake, in Spark’s point of view, is more of a stopgap than a solution.
The goal of Spark is to bring Ethereum-like functionality to the XRP Ledger, which does not have similar problems as the Ethereum ledger.
