ZKsync Announces Historic Airdrop with 3.6 Billion Tokens Distributed

Matter Labs, the creators of ZKsync, announced on Tuesday that a community airdrop for their new ZK tokens will start next week.

The Ethereum Layer 2 service provider will distribute 3.675 billion tokens, representing 17.5% of the total token supply through airdrops, to about 695,232 eligible wallets.

ZK Airdrop Coming Next Week

In the release, the team announced that ZK will have a total supply of around 21 billion tokens. As per Matter Labs’ statement, the 17.5% airdrop makes this the most extensive token distribution from a Layer 2 network.

The report further states that 89% of the airdropped tokens will go to a group classified as users, while 11% will be apportioned to the contributors. Users are people who met the threshold of transactional activities by the snapshot date, March 24.

On the other hand, contributors, including developers, researchers, the community, individuals, and companies, actively participated in turning ZKsnyc into the L2 behemoth it is today. While users will claim tokens from next week, the contributors will have to wait for at least one more and begin making claims from June 24.

ZKSync has provided a wallet eligibility checker where individuals can check whether they qualify for the airdrops. As per the documentation, every airdropped token is immediately unlocked and can be transferred immediately without requiring a vesting period.

Interestingly, 66% of the total ZK tokens allocation is apportioned to the community, while only 33% is allocated to investors and teams. While talking about their decision to apportion more to the community, the ZKsync Association said:

“Awarding more tokens in the airdrop than to the Matter Labs team and investors is more than a symbolic decision for the community… The community will have the largest supply of liquid tokens to direct protocol governance upgrades.”

The distribution of these team tokens will start 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 one year comes a few months after another competitor, StarkWare, was forced to postpone the team unlock date following criticism online.

Real Tokens for Real People

As per the ZkSync statement, this airdrop focuses on rewarding real people while filtering out bots and sybil wallets. The network employs many criteria to spot and reward wallets from real people with real on-chain activity.

When asked whether there would be selling pressure due to a large sum of tokens being unlocked immediately on the airdrop, Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski said, “People are free to dispose of their tokens.”

Alex said that they want holders of the tokens to participate in governance. If one does not want to, they can sell them.