ZKSync to airdrop 17.5% of ZK token supply to 695K wallets

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ZKSync, an Ethereum-based Layer 2 network developed by Matter Labs, is gearing up for its highly anticipated ZK token airdrop. According to the distribution plan released Tuesday, 17.5% of the total 21 billion ZK token supply will be airdropped to users starting next week.

The ZK airdrop is set to be the largest token distribution among major Layer 2 networks, with nearly 3.7 billion tokens allocated to users. Pre-market pricing from perpetuals exchange Aevo values ZK at $0.66, placing the airdrop’s fully diluted value (FDV) above $2.5 billion. On PancakeSwap, the token is averaging at roughly $0.7. For context, this most recent airdrop valuation is roughly three times the total value locked in the ZKSync Era. Current market capitalization for the token is estimated at roughly $14.9 billion.

The project has allocated two-thirds of the ZK token supply to its community, with the majority (89%) of the airdropped tokens going to users who interacted with the ZKSync Era or ZKSync Lite networks before the March 24 snapshot date. The remaining 11% will be distributed to native projects and communities.

To protect against Sybil attacks, ZKSync has set seven eligibility criteria, including interacting with ten smart contracts, trading ten ERC-20 tokens, or depositing liquidity into a DeFi protocol. The airdrop to each wallet is capped at 100,000 tokens. According to a press release from ZKSync, token holders will be able to immediately participate in the protocol’s governance once they claim their tokens.

ZKSync claims that awarding more tokens to the community through the airdrop than to the Matter Labs team and investors is more than just a symbolic decision.

“A wallet’s onchain history reveals a lot about its owner habits. Real people tend to be risk-on, especially the ones that feel like a part of a community. They spend time onchain, ape in, transact, try new protocols, and hold speculative assets. Bots and opportunists are the opposite. Bots take fewer risks with minimal effort while trying to blend into the community and extract value from it,” a ZKNation blog post stated.

Less than 0.5% of the total supply will also be airdropped to various NFT and token communities, including Crypto: The Game players, Pudgy Penguins and Milady Maker NFT holders, and DEGEN and BONSAI airdrop recipients.

The remaining one-third of the ZK token supply is set to be divided almost evenly between investors and the ZKSync development team, Matter Labs, with tokens unlocking over a three-year period from June 2025 to 2028. Matter Labs recently faced backlash for attempting to trademark zero knowledge, an initiative which it subsequently dropped. The protocol developer also recently introduced ZKNation, its new decentralized governance system.

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