ZKSync Era airdrop is trending; whales may be taking an unfair share of tokens

Tokens from the ZKSync Era airdrop are just days away from landing in wallets. For some observers, the airdrop may reward whales instead of spreading tokens to a wider public. 

The ZKSync Era token distribution is one of the events airdrop hunters are most eager to hear. The announcement stated that 3.6B new tokens would be distributed to eligible wallets starting June 17. Contributors to the ecosystem can claim their first rewards from June 24. 

Read: Chronicle Oracles Arrive on zkSync

Close to 700K wallets that communicated with the ecosystem may be eligible to receive a share of new ZKSync Era tokens. However, there are signs that some recipients may be favored and will receive a larger share of the tokens. 

ZKSync Era will have a one-time token distribution, sending 17.5% of its total supply to the community. The token claim page is already open, and tokens will be rewarded until January 3, 2025. ZKSync Era is a high-profile network with DeFi activity and is seen as one of the most valuable projects during this year’s bull market. ZKSync Era is among the trending tokenless protocols in 2024, also promising to achieve real zero-knowledge rollups for scaling Ethereum.

Over time, another 49% of the supply will go into community wallets based on incentives. However, the first airdrop is causing controversy due to unclear eligibility criteria. Some users thought they met all the token requirements but later realized they didn’t have a claim on them.

Who can receive ZKSync Era Tokens?

Community participants noted that the upcoming airdrop for ZKSync Era is not based on clear criteria. Some criteria include activity like owning a Pudgy Penguin NFT, with no mention of supplying the ZKSync Era network with DeFi liquidity. 

Some criteria include general contributions to the project’s ecosystem through quests or interaction with very different assets and apps. About 12K wallets may receive tokens based on a list of barely related activities. 

The current list of wallets eligible for the airdrop is public and is worrying the wider social media community. Users are also angry about their inability to get a fair share of tokens and believe the 12K wallets had an advantage through their head-start. 

The other problem with the airdrop is that some recipients may turn into “whales” as they have interacted with multiple wallets and got a pre-approval. 

To its defense, ZKSync Era announced that it would distribute 89% of the airdrop to the community and another 11% to contributors. The seemingly unrelated wallets are part of the allocation for “experimental communities”, which are only tangentially related to ZKSync Era. 

ZKSync Era has promised a token airdrop to general users based on their DeFi activity as a form of airdrop farming. The tokens were also supposed to be distributed as a reward for paying trading and transaction fees. Almost all projects reward their contributors, but in this case, ZKSync Era also promised its community rewards to incentivize protocol interactions. 

Many of the ZK tokens will remain with Matter Labs and early investors in the project. Over the years, the ZKSync Era will distribute more of its supply to investors. 

ZKSync Era ZK price may be compromised by Sybils

ZKSync Era aims to establish itself as a scalable L2 protocol for high-speed transactions. The project launched as a tokenless network, and a model similar to EigenLayer was chosen. 

Also read: What Is Crypto Airdrop: A Comprehensive Guide

The opportunities for airdrop farming kept the ZKSync Era community loyal. Despite not having a native ZK token until now, the platform carries more than $42M in market capitalization based on third-party tokens. 

The expansion of value on ZKSync Era is also relatively new. The platform started to accrue liquidity since April, and now carries $122.9M in value locked. The other big problem for ZKSync Era may be the ZK token price discovery. 

The token is unlisted and was expected to launch at about $1. However, pre-market speculative activity points to a much lower price. 

The screening page’s failure to filter for large-scale Sybil operations may have also compromised the airdrop. It is possible that some Sybils impersonated real users and are now eligible for more significant rewards. Some Sybil operations are also threatening to crash the price post-market.

The presence of Sybils also undermines the real user count of the ZKSync Era. In the past, the protocol showed a robust number of daily users, which may have turned out to be industrial-scale Sybil operations for airdrop farming. The protocol’s traffic also diminished to near zero ahead of the actual airdrop. 

Cryptopolitan reporting by Hristina Vasileva