Stellar Development Foundation (SDF, which is the non-profit organization founded in 2014 by Jed McCaleb (co-founder of Ripple and its former CTO) and Joyce Kim to “support the development and growth of the open-source Stellar network”, announced on Monday (September 9) that it has partnered with Keybase for its “largest airdrop ever.”

Here is a description of Keybase from Wikipedia:

Keybase is a key directory that maps social media identities to encryption keys (including, but not limited to PGP keys) in a publicly auditable manner. Keybase offers an end-to-end encrypted chat and cloud storage system, called Keybase Chat and the Keybase filesystem respectively. Files placed in the public portion of the filesystem are served from a public endpoint, as well as locally from a filesystem mounted by the Keybase client.

Keybase is available on the web, and available as a downloadable app for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android.

This is how the Keybase website describes Keybase Chat:

Keybase is a free, secure alternative to Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, and other chat apps. It supports groups big and small, communities, and teams. Inside Keybase, all chats are end-to-end encrypted. Imagine if someone broke into Slack's servers and stole and published your company's or family's messages? It would be devastating. Keybase's encryption makes a cloud break-in impossible.

SDF says that it plans to give away up to two billion XLM over the next 20 months, i.e. 100 million XLM each month, to “authenticated” Keybase users.

Keybase says that to join this airdrop program, you must have:

a Keybase account; and

“at least 3 Keybase installs (or paper keys)”.

If your Keybase account was not registered before this announcement, then you need to connect your Keybase account to a GitHub or HackerNews account that is “old enough”, i.e. that was registered before this announcement.

In its blog post, SDF explains why it chose to partner with Keybase:

We first started working with Keybase because they have a great team, and they support our values of privacy, security, and independence from corporate behemoths. They’ve evolved into one of our strongest ecosystem participants. They’ve gone above and beyond integrating Stellar into their wallet, and their userbase would represent a big step up in usage and adoption for the network.

SDF also notes that the airdrop “will run for at least 3 months, with subsequent months subject to basic success metrics for the program.”

According to CryptoCompare, Stellar Lumens (XLM), the native token of the Stellar network, is trading at press time (07:14 UTC on September 10) around $0.0605, up 0.78% in the past 24-hour period: