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zkSync Airdrop: Nearly Half of ZK Tokens Claimed Due to Tech Issues and Sybil Backlash
Ethereum scaling solution zkSync ran into some issues during its long-awaited and controversial ZK token airdrop.
“The network is currently under high load. Some RPC services may experience degraded performance,” the team wrote on Twitter Monday morning. At the time of writing, the team has not yet said the issues have been resolved.
But despite the ongoing issues, ZK Nation, the community created to govern the ecosystem and tokens, said that 45% of tokens airlifted have already been claimed by more than 225,000 wallets.
“It’s Monday,” they joked, “don’t you have to work?”
The ZK Nation team spent the best part of the weekend respond to angry community members on Twitter and update it Frequent questions documentation on how Sybil detection was used to determine eligibility.
Sybil attacks occur when a single user creates and controls a large number of accounts or wallets and uses them to gain outsized influence. But a very vocal user group says Sybil’s detection still lets untrustworthy wallets through.
ZK Nation defended the way it ran the check, saying it was wary of being overly strict due to the risk of excluding real users.
Very sophisticated Sybil wallets, “fund accounts from many distinct exchange addresses, never interact with each other, use random amounts, and use software to randomize everyday patterns of human behavior and even perform tasks unique to the project (e.g., using paymasters of zkSync ),” ZK Nation wrote in its FAQ.
This first wave of airdrops, which will end on January 3, 2025, will distribute tokens to zkSync Era users, ZK Quest participants, security researchers, moderators, GitHub developers, $DEGEN and $BONSAI airdrop recipients, Crypto The Game participants, and holders of the Pudgy Penguin and Milady Maker NFTs.
The second wave will kick off next week, on June 24, and will extend the airdrop to the native zkSync project, external contributors, and the protocol guild.
While GitHub contributors can verify their eligibility with their username for the development platform, they will need to associate their username with a crypto wallet address before claiming their ZK tokens, according to ZK Nation.
List of Binance ZK tokens
Meanwhile, Binance has signaled that it is facing problems of its own as it races to open trading for ZK.
“Our technical team is resolving the issue urgently and it will be recovered before the start of trading,” the exchange wrote on Twitter. “Deposits will be credited once the block height is reached.”
Binance later said the ZK listing would be postponed until the technical problems have been resolved. But ZK is already trading on other exchanges and has seen its price drop 23% to $0.2413 since it launched
The plan was to allow users to deposit ZK into their wallets “in preparation for the exchange,” the company wrote. It will initially list trading pairs for ZK with Bitcoin (BTC), Tether (USDT), First Digital USD (FDUSD) and Turkish Lyra (TRY).
Binance explained in his blog post that TRY actually refers to fiat currency, not Try.Finance’s TRY token.
The company will also give away up to 10.5 million ZK tokens to as many as 52,000 of its users through Binance’s ZK token distribution program, aimed at addressing “ongoing community concerns regarding the distribution of ZK tokens.”
Binance is specifically gifting tokens to wallets that would not otherwise be eligible for ZK tokens, but who have completed at least 50 transactions on zkSync Era L2, excluding automatic transfers.
The ZK token airdrop was criticized by the community for not including sufficient measures to prevent a Sybil attack.