ZKsync to airdrop 3.6 billion ZK tokens next week

The ZKsync Association is set to airdrop 3.675 billion ZK tokens to early users and adopters of the Ethereum Layer 2 network ZKsync next week.

This represents 17.5% of the ZK token's total supply of 21 billion tokens, ZKsync said Tuesday. This will be a one-time airdrop, and users will be able to claim their tokens starting next week until Jan. 3, 2025, ZKsync said. Contributors will be able to claim from June 24.

A further 49.1% of the token supply will be distributed through ecosystem initiatives, with 17.2% allocated to investors and 16.1% to the Matter Labs team.

"Awarding more tokens in the airdrop than to the Matter Labs team and investors is more than a symbolic decision for the community," said the ZKsync Association in a statement. "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."

ZKsync releases details of the long-awaited airdrop

ZKsync shortlisted 695,232 wallets for the airdrop, the project said. Eligibility and allocations for the airdrop were based on a snapshot of activity on ZKsync Era and ZKsync Lite taken on March 24, 2024, at 0:00 UTC, marking the one-year anniversary of the ZKsync Era mainnet launch.

The 17.5% ZK airdrop is split among two sets of community members — users (89%) and contributors (11%). Users are those who transacted on ZKsync and met a threshold of activity. Contributors, on the other hand, are individuals, developers, researchers, communities, and companies who contributed to the ZKsync ecosystem and protocol through development, advocacy, or education, regardless of their network activity.

A breakdown of the 17.5% initial community airdrop. Image: ZKsync.

The rest of the community allocation will be distributed over time through ecosystem initiatives — managed by the ZKsync Foundation — and the ZK Nation governance process to support a growing ecosystem as new users come on-chain, ZKsync said.

Just under half a percent of the supply is being allocated to what the project is calling experimental communities. This includes wallets that received the Degen and Bonsai airdrops — due to activity on decentralized social networks Farcaster and Lens respectively. It will also include those that have played Crypto the Game, which was recently acquired by Uniswap Labs, and NFT projects Pudgy Penguins and Milady Maker.

A breakdown of the ZK token distribution. Image: ZKsync.

The remaining supply is allocated to investors and the Matter Labs team. Their ZK tokens are locked for the first year and then unlocked over three years, from June 2025 to June 2028.

The announcement confirms The Block's reporting from last month that said ZKsync is planning a token airdrop in the middle of June with a total supply of 21 billion tokens. It also introduces a change in branding from zkSync to ZKsync.

How the airdrop allocations were calculated

The community airdrop is based on a points system. Wallets received points for actions, such as interacting with 10 smart contracts on ZKsync Era, depositing liquidity into DeFi protocols and trading more than 10 ERC-20 tokens, among others. Points were also available for some activity on ZKsync Lite, for either donating to a Gitcoin round or transacting over three different months before the launch of ZKsync Era mainnet.

After the points were allocated, each wallet was given an allocation based on assets that had been bridged to ZKSync Era. Addresses could receive multipliers based on their activity on ZKsync and on the Ethereum mainnet.

After this process, addresses that had fewer than 450 ZK tokens had their tokens recycled back into the pool. Those that had more than 100,000 tokens had their excess tokens recycled. As a result, the minimum allocation for each wallet ended up at up to 917 ZK.

Putting 'real people first'

Notably, airdropped tokens will not have any vesting or lock-up periods and are "fully liquid on day one." When asked if that could result in selling pressure, Alex Gluchowski, founder and CEO of Matter Labs, told The Block in an interview that "people are free to dispose of their tokens."

"It's a community governance airdrop," Gluchowski said. "So we hope that the majority of the recipients will participate in the governance, will delegate their tokens, and will become active members of the community. If some of them don't want to do this, it's better if the tokens go into the hands of people who actually deeply care about the protocol."

The ZK token distribution will airdrop a maximum of 100,000 tokens per address. Gluchowski said that's because "it's not a whales-first airdrop. It's a community-first airdrop," adding that he doesn't think anyone would be offended by this cap.

Gluchowski said the airdrop has been designed in a way that "naturally prioritizes humans and puts real people first." Bots that have done a lot of useless activity have been filtered out from the airdrop, he claimed.

Gluchowski acknowledged that while it's really hard to eliminate 100% of the bots, some amount of the allocation could go toward them.

Gluchowski highlighted that two-thirds of the allocation will be going toward the community, more than to the team and investors. He used this to argue that for ZKsync, "community is everything."