The long-awaited airdrop of Flare FLR tokens has begun. Multiple exchanges are participating in the distribution of over 4 billion tokens to those who qualify.

Flare Networks posted a live stream countdown to one of crypto history’s largest token distribution events on January 10.

Flare began airdropping tokens more than two years after a snapshot of XRP holders was taken. Flare is a layer 1 Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchain that aims to integrate smart contracts into the Ripple network.

Flare (formerly known as Spark) stated in October 2022 that it would airdrop 15% of the claimable token to XRP holders at the time of the snapshot.

Today marks the start of that distribution.

According to the first Flare Improvement Proposal (FIP01), 4.28 billion FLR tokens will be distributed. The remaining 24.23 billion tokens will be distributed to those who wrap their FLR tokens monthly in uniform increments over a 36-month period.

Binance, OKX, Kraken, Bithumb, UpBit, and Kucoin were among the centralized exchanges that took part in the airdrop.

Hugo Philion, Flare’s CEO and Co-Founder, stated:

“For the blockchain industry to flourish, we need more useful decentralized applications. Flare is tackling this through data, not just prices but transaction details, Web2 events etc, so that developers can build applications that provide more utility to a larger group of users.”

He went on to say that this could pave the way for the development of new use cases. One possible application would be to link a Flare smart contract action to a payment made on another chain. Furthermore, it may enable a new method of bridging to bring non-smart contract tokens to Flare for use in DeFi applications.

The network also has two core protocols: the State Connector and the Flare Time Series Oracle (FTSO). According to the official website, these enable developers to build a robust and decentralized interoperability ecosystem.

Flare announced the launch of its network a few hours ago.

Ripple’s XRP, from which the Flare Network snapshot was taken in December 2020, received very little reaction.

At the time of publication, the XRP price was down 1% on the day at $0.349 USD. Despite gains by those around it, the cross-border transfer coin has not moved much in the last week.

Furthermore, XRP is down 10% on the month and 90% from its all-time high of $3.40 in January 2018.