ZKsync to Airdrop 3.6 Billion Tokens to Early Users

The ZKsync Association is set to distribute 3.675 billion ZK tokens to its community members beginning next week.

Announced on Tuesday, the airdrop, which makes up 17.5% of the total ZK token supply of 21 billion tokens, will run until Jan. 3, 2025. Contributors can claim their tokens starting June 24.

Once claimed, ZK tokens can be used for governance within the ZKsync protocol, enabling token holders to vote on protocol upgrades and pay network fees.

ZKsync is the third-largest zero-knowledge proof-based Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution, with over $750 million of assets in the network, according to L2Beat.

Token Allocation

According to a blog post by ZKsync, 49.1% of the entire token supply will be allocated to various ecosystem initiatives. Additionally, 17.2% of the tokens are reserved for investors, and 16.1% will go to Matter Labs, the company developing ZKsync. These team tokens will be locked for one year and will gradually unlock from June 2025 to June 2028.

"Awarding more tokens in the airdrop than to the Matter Labs team and investors is more than a symbolic decision for the community,” the press release stated. “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.”

Airdrop Execution

A total of 695,232 wallets are eligible for the airdrop, based on activities recorded on ZKsync Era and ZKsync Lite as of March 24, 2024. The distribution will be divided between users (89%) and contributors (11%).

ZKsync has capped the maximum allocation to any single address at 100,000 tokens.

ZKsync employs a points system to determine token distribution. Points were awarded for activities like interacting with smart contracts, providing liquidity to DeFi protocols, and trading ERC-20 tokens.

Activities on ZKsync Lite, such as donating to Gitcoin rounds, also earned points. Wallets with fewer than 450 ZK tokens will have their allocations recycled back into the pool to ensure a minimum of 917 ZK per wallet.

In March, ZKsync’s total value locked (TVL) peaked at $930 million. However, the TVL has since decreased to $750 million, according to data from L2 beat.