Yesterday, ZKsync announced that they will be conducting an airdrop next week and opening up airdrop inquiries, marking the end of a 4-year long journey. However, compared to previous Layer 2 solutions like Optimism and Arbitrum, ZKsync has a significantly lower percentage of eligible addresses for the airdrop. With a total of 6,826,968 addresses on the ZKsync chain, only 695,232 addresses qualify, accounting for approximately 10%. Community statistics show that 9,203 addresses have received 23.9% of the total airdrop.
Subsequently, ZKsync released the airdrop guidelines, revealing that while the rules are not necessarily strict, they are somewhat unconventional compared to standard practices. This has led to a surge in community concerns over potential insider trading related to ZKsync.
Why are there so few eligible addresses?
Before ZKsync officially announced the airdrop rules, entities such as Nansen, TrustGo, and some crypto influencers had made predictions regarding the number of eligible participants. TrustGo’s report, for example, indicated that 2.9 million addresses met the qualifying score, even under strict criteria where 2.05 million addresses would still be eligible. Crypto influencer @DefiWimar estimated that there would be 1,650,351 addresses meeting the requirements based on an analysis of the ZK Nation website code.
However, the final number of eligible addresses fell far short of these predictions. One of the main reasons for this is that ZKsync set relatively unconventional criteria compared to previous practices. For instance, a benchmark address provided by TrustGo ranked at 500,000th place in their model, but only fulfilled one of the 7 essential conditions set by ZKsync. Typically, airdrop criteria focus on factors like interaction activity, duration, and the magnitude of funds involved. ZKsync, however, introduced 7 thresholds, such as interacting with 10 contracts, providing liquidity, using Paymaster, trading 10 ERC20 tokens, and holding a specific NFT, which eliminated many potential participants.
While a previous ZKsync report compiled by Odaily in April had noted that “Paymaster and LIBERTAS OMNIBUS COLLECTION are important differentiation standards,” it was published after the snapshot date.
After passing the initial threshold, ZKsync also introduced innovative capital retention requirements as a core parameter for airdrop allocation calculations.
Caught in the controversy of insider trading
While stringent rules or somewhat unconventional practices may fall within an acceptable range for the community, a series of questionable actions by ZKsync have heightened concerns.
Opaque decision-making authority
Firstly, ZKsync established 7 mandatory conditions, emphasizing that meeting one of them was necessary to proceed to the subsequent calculations. However, in the guidelines, ZKsync stated:
“Satisfying one or more of the airdrop criteria does not imply a legal right or claim to receive the airdrop, and all decisions related to airdrop allocation will be solely determined by the ZKSync Association.”
This wording significantly fueled dissatisfaction among community users, with many questioning whether ZKsync’s actions were essentially designed to facilitate insider trading and deprive users of their rightful tokens.
Furthermore, in the document’s conclusion, ZKsync mentioned that addresses meeting the airdrop requirements but holding less than 450 tokens would have their allocated tokens revoked, further exacerbating community tensions.
Nansen distances themselves
Following the exclusion of numerous addresses from the airdrop, some users accused Nansen of conducting anti-whale measures and address screening on behalf of ZKsync, resulting in disqualification from the airdrop.
Responding to these allegations, Nansen swiftly clarified that they had provided Matter Labs with data on specific wallets, such as whale users and known scammers. However, they denied implementing anti-whale measures or providing advice on airdrop allocations.
Suspicious addresses raise questions, but no direct response from the official sources
After the airdrop links were made public, various screenshots showcasing large token allocations began circulating in the community. However, one mysterious address, 0xF1802d9a70Bdc6F6EffD65d44b33226eE0E6A821, raised direct suspicions within the community. In the regular user airdrop by ZKsync, the token limit was set at 100,000 tokens, yet this address received 564,000 tokens. Apart from this address, there were several low activity addresses circulating in the community that received disproportionately high token allocations.
In response to these concerns, neither the official ZKsync account nor the ZKNation account provided a direct response. Eighty minutes later, the zkSwap Finance ecosystem emerged to clarify that the address in question belonged to zkSwap and was allocated tokens by ZKsync for their project development. zkSwap emphasized that these tokens would be utilized for protocol and community development, somewhat alleviating the suspicions.
However, not all questions were addressed, as several known whale addresses that had been identified earlier still received airdrops from ZKsync, including the Arbitrum whale from over a year ago and the recent LayerZero whale.
Artemis, a witch hunter, posted on the X platform, revealing that a whale user who participated in the Arbitrum airdrop and made a profit of $4.2 million was still eligible to receive nearly 1 million ZK tokens with over 3,000 wallet addresses. Further investigations by Artemis uncovered that some insider trading accounts acquired over 2 million ZK tokens by depositing identical amounts of Ethereum on the same day, with each wallet receiving an average of 15,000 ZK tokens. Most of these accounts were also listed on @LayerZero_Labs’ witch list.
However, similar to the situation with zkSwap, the official accounts did not respond to these allegations, with only ZKsync’s CEO Alex continuously sharing positive sentiments regarding the airdrop.
Resistance continues unabated
The silence from ZKsync has further fueled community resistance, with calls for major exchanges to refrain from listing ZK (ZKsync) tokens gaining momentum. The narrative of returning the ZK name to polyhedra has been spreading, but ZKsync appears unlikely to revise the airdrop rules and scope based on community feedback.
Looking back at the overall “fleecing” interaction process, where Starknet set a 0.005 ETH threshold and ZKsync’s capital retention calculation rules, the chances of earning substantial airdrops through simple interactions based on frequency and duration are diminishing. The financial thresholds are becoming increasingly high, resembling a point-based system, signaling the end of an era of easy interactions within the ZKsync ecosystem.
