News
ZKsync announces historic airdrop with 3.6 billion tokens distributed
Matter Labs, the makers of ZKsync, announced on Tuesday that a community airdrop for their new ZK tokens will begin next week.
The Ethereum Layer 2 service provider will distribute 3.675 billion tokens, representing 17.5% of the total token supply via airdrop, to approximately 695,232 eligible wallets.
ZK Airdrop coming next week
In the press release, the team announced That ZK it will have a total supply of approximately 21 billion tokens. According to Matter Labs’ statement, the 17.5% airdrop makes this the largest token distribution from a Layer 2 network.
The report also states that 89% of distributed tokens will go to a group classified as users, while 11% will be split among contributors. Users are people who have reached the transactional activity threshold by the snapshot date, March 24.
On the other hand, contributors, including developers, researchers, communities, individuals and companies, have actively participated in transforming ZKsnyc into the L2 giant it is today. While users will request tokens starting next week, contributors will have to wait for at least one more and start submitting requests from June 24.
ZKSync has provided a wallet eligibility check where people can check if they are eligible for airdrops. According to the documentation, every token dropped on the plane is immediately unlocked and can be transferred immediately without requiring a vesting period.
Interestingly, 66% of the total ZK token allocation is allocated to the community, while only 33% is allocated to investors and teams. Speaking about the decision to distribute more to the community, the ZKsync Association said:
“Awarding more tokens in the airdrop than to the Matter Labs team and investors is more of a symbolic decision for the community… The community will have the largest supply of liquid tokens to direct protocol governance updates.”
Distribution of these team tokens will begin in June 2025 and continue for a four-year vesting period ending in 2028. The decision to delay the unlock dates for team tokens by a year comes just months after another contender , StarkWarewas forced to postpone the team’s unlock date following online criticism.
Real tokens for real people
According to ZkSync’s statement, this airdrop focuses on rewarding real people by filtering out bots and Sybil wallets. The network uses many criteria to identify and reward the wallets of real people with real assets on the chain.
Asked whether there would be selling pressure due to the immediate unlocking of a large sum of tokens during the airdrop, Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski said: “People are free to have their own tokens.”
Alex said that they want token holders to participate in governance. If one doesn’t want to, he can sell them.