Written by: Nancy, PANews
After the community has been eagerly waiting for a long time, on June 11, zkSync finally announced its coin issuance plan. The distribution plan of over 3.6 billion ZK tokens makes it the largest L2 airdrop project. However, this airdrop feast that has been waiting for 4 years is only a victory for 10% of qualified addresses, and zkSync has been accused of backstabbing the interests of the community. At the same time, zkSync's airdrop rules have also been caught in a "rat warehouse" storm due to opacity, centralized token distribution, large-scale airdrops to witch addresses, and the recovery of the minimum allocation, and the official "never mind" attitude has aroused the anger of the community.
Affected by community dissatisfaction, data from Whales Market shows that in the past 24 hours, the over-the-counter price of zkSync token ZK has fallen by more than 59.2% from its high point. L2BEAT data shows that zkSync's TVL has fallen to 750 million, a drop of 13.37% in the past 24 hours.
Airdrops exceed 3.6 billion tokens, interaction, funds and time become the key basis for airdrops
According to zkSync's ZK token distribution plan, in addition to 49.2% of the token supply being distributed through the ecosystem program, 17.2% to investors, and 16.1% to the Matter Labs team, 17.5% of the total supply (or 3.675 billion tokens) will be distributed to community users, of which 89% will be distributed to zkSync users, who must meet certain trading activity standards, and the remaining 11% will be distributed to ecosystem contributors, including zkSync native projects (5.8%), on-chain communities (2.8%), and developers (2.4%).
Additionally, zkSync is allocating 0.4875% of the total supply to a small group of experimental on-chain communities to explore new ways to organize with tokens and NFTs, including DEGEN and BONSAI airdrop recipients, Crypto the Game players, and Pudgy and Milady holders.
For the community airdrop, zkSync uses a points system where wallets can earn points by doing things like interacting with 10 smart contracts on zkSync Era, depositing liquidity into DeFi protocols, and trading more than 10 ERC-20 tokens. Points can also be earned for certain activities on zkSync Lite, such as donating to Gitcoin rounds or trading in three different months before the launch of the zkSync Era mainnet. After points are allocated, each wallet will receive an allocation based on the assets that have been bridged to zkSync Era. Addresses can receive multipliers based on their activity on zkSync and the Ethereum mainnet. There is no vesting or lock-up period for airdropped tokens.
According to @xiaoyubtc’s interpretation, in the airdrop rule setting of zkSync, on-chain interaction, on-chain asset value and time occupy a relatively important weight, and the witch detection method is relatively simple. It is to detect among all addresses that meet the conditions. There are only two criteria: reuse of exchange deposit addresses and source of funds.
The airdrop rules face multiple questions, and the official said that it is up to the association to decide
PANews is facing multiple questions from the community due to the token airdrop distribution. In the "ZkSync Airdrop Evaluation" initiated by X yesterday, as many as 63.9% of users chose the option of "Unprecedented, Chaos Witch Rules + Rat Trading".
Perhaps anticipating the airdrop controversy, zkSync emphasized in the terms of the airdrop claim interface that meeting one or more of the above airdrop criteria does not mean a legal right or requirement to receive an airdrop, and all decisions related to airdrop allocation are made by the ZKSync Association at its sole discretion. This statement gives the official right to interpret freely, but also makes users question its transparency.
"Unfortunately, address is not eligible for the airdrop." For many users who have worked hard to interact, zkSync's airdrop rules are undoubtedly a bucket of cold water.
According to information released by zkSync, only 695,232 of the more than 6 million wallet addresses are eligible for airdrops, accounting for only 10%. Ninety percent of the addresses were reversed, which is far lower than the estimated 2 million addresses by Trusta Labs, the Web3 identity and reputation infrastructure. Not only that, even zkSync's ecological projects were excluded from the airdrop list. For example, NFT market Element tweeted that as the largest NFT market on ZKsync, they did not receive any airdrops and questioned whether this was a joke; zkApes also tweeted that the platform generated $15 million in gas fees but did not receive any airdrops.
However, due to not using the Sybil addresses previously identified by LayerZero, and the airdrop details being vague compared to other projects such as Arbitrum, zkSync's airdrop rules have been questioned as black boxes, and even included confirmed Sybil addresses in the airdrop list. According to community statistics, more than 9,200 addresses (accounting for 1.3% of the airdrop list) can receive more than 90,000 ZKs, accounting for 23.9% of the total airdrop, which means that a large number of airdrop rewards are concentrated in a few addresses.
At the same time, witch hunter Artemis also found in the list of airdrop qualifications of zkSync that a witch user who made a profit of $4.2 million in the Arbitrum airdrop still has airdrop qualifications, and obtained nearly 1 million ZK tokens with more than 3,000 wallet addresses; some witch accounts marked on the LayerZero witch list also obtained more than 2 million ZK tokens by depositing the same amount of Ethereum funds on the same day, and each wallet received an average of 15,000 ZK tokens. Compared with the high returns of these witch addresses, the average number of tokens distributed to all airdrop addresses is about 5,286, which is far from the average.
Amid the community’s doubts, Nansen was also affected and quickly clarified that they only provided Matter Labs with data on specific wallet segments, including whale addresses and known scammers, but did not participate in anti-sybiling or directly suggest specific distribution methods for airdrops.
In addition, zkSync's lack of attention to the interests of retail investors is also one of the important factors of community dissatisfaction. According to zkSync's airdrop rules, the minimum allocation for each wallet is ultimately 917 ZK, and each address can airdrop up to 100,000 tokens. If the address holds less than 450 or more than 100,000 ZK tokens, the tokens will be recycled into the pool. Although this rule can prevent large users from benefiting too much, the zeroing of low-security numbers is considered to deprive users of the rights and interests they should have enjoyed.
At the same time, zkSync also stated that by participating in the airdrop, participants explicitly acknowledge and assume all risks associated therewith, including (but not limited to) the following risks: In no event shall the zkSync Association or any of its directors, executive employees, representatives, consultants or agents be liable for any claims, losses, damages or other liabilities, whether in contractual tort or other liabilities arising from the airdrop or the minting and claiming of any ZK tokens. At present, zkSync officials have not yet made the latest response to the community's dissatisfaction, and the "final right of interpretation" seems to have become its amulet.
In short, the zkSync airdrop incident exposed its imbalance in community interest considerations and the opacity of rule-making. It also means that the era of relying on simple interactions to win airdrops is gone forever.
