ZkSync Will Airdrop 3.7 Billion ZK Tokens to User Wallets Next Week

ZkSync will begin distributing two-thirds of its 21 billion ZK token supply to community wallets next week in what will be the largest token distribution from an Ethereum scaling project.

An initial airdrop of 17.5% of the tokens will take place next week and the rest will be distributed through ecosystem initiatives and governance measures voted on by the newly created ZK Nation. The airdropped tokens, which will be distributed to 695,232 wallets, will be fully liquid on day one and not be subject to a lock-up period.

But the foundation has capped the maximum allocation to any one wallet at 100,000 ZK tokens.

"It's easy for whales to run away with large allocations without any constraints," the foundation wrote in a press release. "By capping whales, the ZK airdrop fairly rewards community members that contribute to zkSync in different ways."

That means 89% of airdropped tokens will go to users who've been active in the ecosystem and the rest will be distributed to developers, researchers, and companies that have contributed to the zkSync L2.

The one-third of tokens that's not been allocated to the community will be split: 17.2% for investors and another 16.1% for the Matter Labs team. The investor and Matter Labs tokens will be under a 1-year lockup, after which they'll gradually unlock until June 2028.

Matter Labs, the company behind the popular Ethereum scaling solution, said eligibility and allocations for the airdrop was determined by a March 24 snapshot of users who've been active on the zkSync Era L2 or used the zkSync Lite wallet—"marking the one-year anniversary of zkSync Era mainnet launch," the company wrote in a press release.

zkSync Era launched last March. It saw its total value locked peak at $990 million in March this year, around the time when markets were getting a huge boost from Bitcoin ETF frenzy, but has since receded to $786 million, according to L2 Beat. That makes it the 8th largest L2 by total value locked.

Arbitrum One, an L2 scaling solution that uses optimistic rollup technology, is far and away the most dominant. It accounts for $18 billion worth of total value locked, which is approximately 40% of all assets currently on Ethereum L2 networks.