Ethereum zero-knowledge (ZK) layer-2 scaler zkSync has launched its self-titled token, zkSync (ZK), and plans to airdrop nearly 3.68 billion of them “next week.”
The project said on June 11 that starting next week, it will airdrop 17.5% of the token’s total supply of 21 billion to the 695,232 eligible wallets — with the rest set aside for initiatives, its team, investors and a “token assembly.”
ZK traded up to $0.71 on pre-market perpetual exchanges Aevo and PancakeSwap — meaning its market capitalization would be around $14.91 billion.
Around 3.27 billion tokens — or 89% of the ZK set for the airdrop — will be handed to the network’s users, with the remainder allocated to native projects and communities.
The wallets getting a slice of the drop must have interacted with the zkSync Era or zkSync Lite networks before the March 24, midnight UTC snapshot date.
ZKsync’s list of seven eligible criteria — which it said aims to protect against Sybil attacks — includes a wallet interacting with 10 smart contracts, trading 10 ERC-20 tokens or depositing liquidity into a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, among others.
The airdrop to each wallet is capped at 100,000 tokens.
It added less than 0.5% of the total supply would also be dropped to Crypto: The Game players, holders of the Pudgy Penguins and Milady Maker nonfungible token (NFT) collections, along with Degen (DEGEN) and Bonsai Token (BONSAI) airdrop recipients.
Community airdrop more than “symbolic”
The remaining one-third of the ZK token’s total supply is set for a near-even split between investors and the zkSync development team Matter Labs, which received broad backlash in May for trying to trademark “ZK.” It later dropped the attempt.
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The tokens are slated to unlock over three years, between June 2025 and 2028.
“Awarding more tokens in the airdrop than to the Matter Labs team and investors is more than a symbolic decision for the community,” zkSync wrote in a press release shared with Cointelegraph.
The airdrop starts next week and runs until Jan. 3, 2025. Holders can immediately participate in the protocols’ governance.
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