ZKsync to Airdrop 17.5% Of Its ZK Supply- Here’s When

ZKsync, the Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution, announced an airdrop of 17.5% of its native token supply, ZK. Matter Labs, the firm behind the development of ZKsync, disclosed the airdrop plan through its official site on Tuesday. The announcement affirmed that it will be a one-time airdrop from next week until January 3, 2025.

Notably, 17.5% represents a whopping 3.68 billion ZK tokens from its total supply of 21 billion tokens, making it the largest airdrop among Layer 2 solutions. In line with ZK’s current price on the perpetual exchange Aevo, the airdrop is valued above $2.5 billion. Similarly, the amount of the airdrop surpasses its ZKsync Era’s total value locked (TVL) of $815 million.

Additionally, the company intends to airdrop two-thirds of its tokens, equating to 67% of the total supply. Apart from the upcoming 17.5% airdrop, Matter Labs mentioned its plan to distribute the remaining percentage (around 49.1%) over time through its ZK Nation and ZKsync Foundation. The project, via these distributions, aims to strengthen the ecosystem when new users come on-chain.

The project allocates the first airdrop (17.5%) among two types of community members: users and contributors. 89% of the 3.68 billion tokens will be divided among users, while the contributors will receive the remaining 11%. Contributors are the developers, researchers, and individuals who contributed to the project through development, education, and advocacy. According to the official blog post, contributors could claim their awards starting June 24. 

ZKsync Imposes Seven Eligibility Criteria To Give Airdrop

ZKsync has set seven eligibility criteria for receivers to prevent Sybil attacks. A Sybil attack points to the hacker’s attempt to steal the awards with multiple fake identities. The user must interact with 10 smart contracts, deposit liquidity into a DeFi protocol, and trade 10 ERC-20 tokens, among the practices an airdrop receiver should have executed before. According to the press release, the validated user could receive 100,000 ZK tokens at maximum. And the users will be eligible to participate in the protocol’s governance immediately after they will have received the tokens. 

While speaking on the airdrop initiative, Matter Labs noted in a statement;

Awarding more tokens in the airdrop than to the Matter Labs team and investors is more than a symbolic decision for the community. When the ZKsync governance system launches in the coming weeks, the community will have the largest supply of liquid tokens to direct protocol governance upgrades.

The announcement revealed that ZKsync had shortlisted 695,232 wallet addresses for the airdrop. The firm determined users’ eligibility for airdrops by taking activity screenshots on ZKsync Lite and ZKsync Era. These screenshots were taken on March 24, 2024, at 0:00 UTC, marking the first anniversary ZKsync mainnet launch.

Apart from making many ZK holders happy with the airdrop disclosure, it also sparked controversy among some community members. For example, a user on the X platform urged that he is not eligible to receive the airdrop despite using only one wallet.

He wrote:

How if am I not eligible? I’m in tears seriously.. been using only one wallet, checked out and used different protocols. Ah, just so dissapointing,

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