Starknet's STRK Could Debut With Market Cap of Over $1B, Aevo's Pre-Launch Futures Suggest

• Layer 2 scaling solution Starknet is set to airdrop over 700 million STRK tokens on Feb. 20.
• Decentralized exchange Aevo's pre-launch futures suggest an inception price of $1.65, implying a market cap of $1.2 billion.

Layer 2 scaling solution Starknet, focused on improving the performance of decentralized applications on Ethereum, is set to debut its native token STRK on Feb. 20 through an airdrop or free distribution of 728 million tokens to around 1.3 million wallets.

Price discovery in the pre-debut futures listed on decentralized Aevo indicates that the highly-anticipated token could debut with a market capitalization of over $1 billion.

As of writing, STRK/USD pre-launch perpetual futures changed hands at $1.65 on Aevo, implying a market cap of $1.2 billion. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of circulating coins ($728 million) with the going market price of the contract ($1.65).

The impending airdrop of 728 million tokens represents nearly 7% of the total supply. So, the pre-listing price of $1.65 implies a fully diluted market cap (FDV) of over $16 billion. FDV is a projection of the market cap once all the tokens in a project are in circulation.

"The market is clearly extremely excited about Starknet, as it is the most well-known ZK chain," Aevo’s co-founder and CEO Julian Koh told CoinDesk.

Aevo listed the STRK/USD pre-launch contract early Wednesday. The decentralized exchange unveiled the pre-listing perpetual futures market in August last year, allowing traders to speculate on the token’s ideal inception price.

These pre-listing perpetual futures are similar to “I owe you” or IOU futures offered by some exchanges. Once the token goes live, the pre-listing perpetuals will reference the STRK price and collect funding rates from traders to keep perpetual prices in sync with the token’s spot price.