ZKsync Unveils ‘Mother of All’ Airdrops With 17.5% Token Supply Distribution – Unchained

ZKsync plans to airdrop 3.6 billion ZK tokens to 695,232 wallets. Around 89% of the airdropped tokens, which will be liquid from day one, will go to ZKsync users.

ZKsync, the Ethereum layer 2 rollup solution built by Matter Labs, has disclosed the distribution details of its proposed ZK token airdrop that will put 17.5% of its token supply into the hands of the community.

The ZK token will have a maximum supply of 21 billion tokens, of which, 3.67 billion tokens will be airdropped to users and early contributors of the protocol, according to token allocation documents shared with Unchained. 

The protocol claims that an allocation of this size to 695,232 wallets will be the largest distribution of tokens to users amongst major layer 2 networks and dubs its distribution “the mother of all drops.” 

It is worth noting that these tokens will be liquid on day one, without being subject to any vesting or lock up periods. The amount of airdropped tokens is also larger than the 16.1% of supply earmarked for the Matter Labs team and 17.2% to be distributed to investors — these tokens will be locked for the first year, and then gradually be released between June 2025 and 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,” said the ZKsync team.

“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.”

Around 89% of the airdropped tokens will go to ZKsync users, and 11% will go towards individuals, communities and companies that contributed to the ecosystem, regardless of their activity. Community members will be able to claim from next week, while contributors can claim from June 24.

In order to be eligible for the airdrop, users of ZKsync Era must have either interacted with 10 smart contracts, deposited liquidity into a DeFi protocol, initiated five transactions using a paymaster, traded 10 ERC-20 tokens or hold a Libertas Omnibus NFT. ZKsync Lite users will be assessed based on whether they donated to a Gitcoin funding round or transacted in at least three months before the ZKsync Era mainnet was launched. A snapshot of user activity was taken on March 24, 2024, which marked the one-year anniversary of ZKsync Era mainnet launch.

Last week, Unchained reported that a 10% airdrop from ZKsync could translate to a staggering $1.32 billion market capitalization, which is almost double ZKsync’s current TVL, based on pre-launch market prices of $0.63 per token on perpetuals platform Aevo.

At the time of the announcement, the pre-market launch price was $0.66 per token, which placed ZKsync’s airdrop at a value of $2.42 billion. The pre-market launch price has since dropped to $0.36, placing the valuation at $1.32 billion.

June 11, 2024, 07:46 am ET: This story has been updated to add new information on the pre-market launch price for ZK token.