Nearly a week before Flare Network’s scheduled airdrop of Spark tokens to the XRP holders, Coinbase announced its plan to support the event. As revealed in the official blog post, the eligible customers holding an XRP balance on Coinbase or Coinbase Pro on the snapshot date and time of 12th of December 2020, 00:00 AM UTC, will receive Spark tokens from Coinbase at a later date after the launch of Flare network.
Furthermore, the amount of Spark tokens received by the user depends on the amount of XRP holdings in their account at the snapshot time. Prior to the snapshot time, sends and receives will be disabled and would resume shortly after the snapshot is complete.
While acknowledging that Coinbase’s decision to support any asset requires significant technical and compliance review and may be subject to regulatory approval in some jurisdictions, the platform further notified,
“We, therefore, cannot guarantee when or if Spark will be available for distribution in any specific jurisdiction at this time. We will add support jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction, subject to applicable review, and authorizations.”
More than 65 platforms have extended support for Flare Network’s airdrop. Apart from Coinbase, other prominent platforms in the list include names such as Binance, Bitfinex, Bithumb, Bitstamp, eToro, OKEx, Kraken, Huobi.
Why the Hype?
Coinbase has been a little late in the game as just last week, Flare Networks had claimed the platform of “barely engaging” with Flare. It went on to say that the crypto exchange was likely “too late to do the work” to support the Spark’s FLR distribution at this point. Nevertheless, Coinbase became the latest platform to have signed up for the airdrop, but why the hype?
To answer that question it is essential to understand that Flare Networks is essentially a blockchain network that is funded by Ripple. On the 13th of November, it announced an upcoming airdrop, called the Spark Airdrop Program which enabled anyone holding XRP to receive free tokens at a 1:1 ratio.
Spark is the native token of the Flare Network, which is a system that is focussed on bringing Ethereum-like functionality to the XRP Ledger. Flare Network’s official release had previously outlined,
“Flare is the world’s first Turing complete Federated Byzantine Agreement [FBA] network. It integrates the Ethereum Virtual Machine [EVM] and does not derive safety from a token… Flare’s token, Spark is created through what may be the first-ever utility fork whereby the origin network, in this case, the XRP Ledger, benefits through increased utility”
The latest airdrop development has caused a stir in terms of XRP’s value as well. This could be attributed to Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse’s push in a recent interview with CNN wherein he said that Flare “doing some very interesting stuff with something called the Spark token”. While admitting that the network was quite different from that of Ripple the exec had claimed that the latest stint as an example of people’s recognition that “XRP is such an efficient digital asset”.
XRP’s Breaks A Major Downtrend
XRP has witnessed a monumental rise as the day for the much-anticipated airdrop neared. Despite this, XRP’s price has not been able to break the $1 barrier yet. However, after a pretty mundane consolidation over the past two months, XRP’s price rose to levels not seen since June 2018. It touched $0.705 before retracing to its press time price of $0.609.
