PANews reported on June 19 that according to DL News, the decentralized social media protocol Lens Protocol, launched by Aave founder Stani Kulechov, is expected to be a major beneficiary of the ZKsync token issuance. According to internal sources, representatives of the ZKsync zero-knowledge proof protocol have promised Lens a considerable amount of tokens to support Lens' construction on the protocol. Although the specific number of tokens has not been disclosed, the appeal of Lens has caused other projects competing with ZKsync to attract it to withdraw from the bidding, as Lens representatives stated that they have been offered approximately 0.5% of the total supply of the recently launched ZK token. At the current ZK token price of $0.21, this share is equivalent to approximately $22.4 million.
Matter Labs, the core developer of ZKsync, and Avara, the parent company of Lens, declined to comment. Kulechov had previously announced plans to build a new version of Lens on ZKsync in May. On Monday, Matter Labs airdropped a total of 3.6 billion ZK tokens to about 700,000 wallets. Among them, Aave, the lending protocol founded by Kulechov, received about 8.3 million tokens, and Lens received about 5.6 million tokens, which is worth about $3 million at current prices.
Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of Avara, said that many ZK-native and non-ZK-native projects have similar token distributions. “For the tokens obtained by Lens, it will be decided by the Lens community according to the LIP process (Lens Improvement Proposal), which allows anyone to propose improvement proposals.”