Juno tokenholders appear to be on the verge of voting away most of the assets of a “whale” who supposedly “gamed” the genesis airdrop of the layer 1 smart contract platform.

Some 30.6 million free Juno tokens were airdropped to Atom stakeholders based on a snapshot taken in February 2021.

There was supposed to be a “hard cap” of 50,000 Juno tokens per person, but because the whale had divided their holdings over 52 different wallets, they received far more tokens than they were supposed to.

The funds were consolidated into a single wallet right after the airdrop, indicating that one entity had control over all the addresses. That wallet now holds 3.1 million Juno, with a total value of US$105.9 million.

Juno stakeholders are now voting on Proposition 16, which would reduce the assets of that wallet to just 50,000 Juno, worth US$1.7 million.

“The facts are that the Juno genesis stakedrop was gamed by a single entity. Willingly or unwillingly is not relevant to this matter,” the proposal reads.

With two days left to vote yesterday, the measure was looking likely to pass, leading by 15 million tokens to 3.2 million, a turnout of 86.5 per cent.

A user purporting to be the Juno Whale wrote on Medium that they were a fund, not an individual, and they didn’t game the airdrop “with insider information”.

“Is it possible to deprive someone of his or her individual asset if it benefits the general public? It never should be,” they wrote.


The vote was first reported by Coindesk, which noted that it had had “immense implications”.

“In a very loose sense, it undermines the core cryptocurrency value proposition that if you control your own private cryptographic keys, you have total control over your tokens,” wrote columnist David Z. Morris.

People have mixed views on Twitter.

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