Ethereum’s layer-2 scaling solution, zkSync, has introduced its own token, zkSync (ZK), and is preparing to distribute approximately 3.68 billion of them through an upcoming airdrop.
Scheduled to begin next week, the project plans to airdrop 17.5% of the total supply of 21 billion tokens to 695,232 eligible wallets. The remaining tokens will be allocated for various initiatives, the team, investors, and a token reserve.
Currently, ZK is trading at $0.71 on pre-market exchanges like Aevo and PancakeSwap, indicating a potential market capitalization of around $14.91 billion.
The distribution of ZK tokens will see approximately 3.27 billion tokens, which make up 89% of the airdrop allocation, distributed to network users. The remaining tokens will be allocated to native projects and communities.
To qualify for the airdrop, wallets must have interacted with zkSync Era or zkSync Lite networks before the midnight UTC snapshot on March 24.
Criteria for eligibility include activities such as interacting with smart contracts, trading ERC-20 tokens, or providing liquidity to a DeFi protocol. Each wallet can receive up to 100,000 tokens.
In addition to the general airdrop, less than 0.5% of the total supply will be distributed to players of Crypto: The Game, holders of specific NFT collections, and recipients of DEGEN and BONSAI tokens.
The remaining one-third of the total token supply will be evenly split between investors and the zkSync development team, Matter Labs, which faced criticism in May for attempting to trademark “ZK.”
The tokens will be unlocked gradually over three years, between June 2025 and 2028. According to zkSync, awarding more tokens in the airdrop than to investors and the development team is a significant decision for the community.
The airdrop will commence next week and continue until January 3, 2025, allowing holders to participate in the governance of the protocol immediately. Learn more about how Ethereum’s ZK-rollups can become interoperable.