ZkSync community reacts to airdrop debacle

Ethereum scaling solution zkSync will airdrop 3.6 billion ZK tokens to users next week, but the crypto community said the distribution list is unfair.

A year after users first anticipated a governance token, zero-knowledge (ZK) layer-2 network zkSync confirmed an airdrop for active on-chain participants. Following a snapshot in March, over 695,000 users are set to receive 17.5% of ZK’s total supply of 21 billion tokens. 

The project also allocated two-thirds of its token supply to the community. zkSync designated around 33.3% of all ZK tokens to team members and investors over a four-year lock period.

Community decries zkSync allocations to Sybil wallets

While its 3.6 billion token airdrop is the largest among major rollups to date, users expressed discontent with the protocol’s eligibility data. In a rare occurrence, the project released the CSV containing all eligible wallet addresses on GitHub.

Sybil accounts, which are defined by a single entity controlling multiple accounts, were found to have accumulated thousands of tokens. Meanwhile, some single-account users were reportedly inelgible for the airdrop, further fueling community scrutiny.

One user, self-described as “Artemis the Sybil Hunter,” claimed Sybial accounts could receive up to two million ZK tokens from the airdrop. Several of the same addresses are disqualified from LayerZero’s distribution, as the protocol launched a campaign against Sybil clusters. 

Polygon Labs CISO Mudit Gupta said zkSync used almost no Sybil filtering. “Anyone who knew the criteria could’ve easily farmed the sh*t out of it”, Gupta said as the broader defi community reacted to the latest airdrop debacle. 

Data provider Nansen clarified that the firm did not provide “anit-Sybil” support to zkSync’s parent Matter Labs. Although the details are public, the project reserves the right to decide who could receive the airdrop, leaving room for criteria changes in the near future.

This year’s airdrops have been contentious, to say the least. Users who spent several months to multiple years engaging with protocols were sometimes left disappointed with distribution plans and tokenomics. As crypto.news reported, Starknet marked a sharp drop in user activity after its token announcement. The pattern is not strange during crypto airdrop, but users were more frustrated with the allocation.