$ZK announced that some regions will not participate in their airdrop due to compliance with international sanctions. These regions include Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and some special regions in Ukraine such as Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. 

These geographic restrictions are to comply with penalty regulations issued by the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), and the Diplomatic Service. Europe (EEAS) and the UK Treasury (HMT). Additionally, residents of the US will not be allowed to participate in the airdrop.

Total number of tokens distributed

The snapshot for the ZK airdrop was taken on March 24, 2024, at 00:00:00 UTC, marked by Era Block Number 29710983 and Lite Block Number 187273. Claiming the airdrop for ZKsync users will begin on the week of June 17, 2024 and lasting until January 3, 2025. A total of 3,675,000,000 tokens will be distributed to 695,232 valid wallet addresses.

There are two main categories where wallets can qualify for the 17.5% airdrop: Users and Contributors. Users, representing 89% of the airdrop, transferred funds to ZKsync Era and met at least 1 of the 7 eligibility criteria. Contributors, representing 11%, include individuals, developers, researchers, communities and companies who have contributed to the ZKsync ecosystem through development, promotion, education or participation.

The Airdrop process is based on usage

The first step in the usage-based airdrop process is to check every traded address on ZKsync Era and ZKsync Lite against the eligibility criteria. These criteria include smart contract interactions, paymaster activity, token trading, DeFi liquidity provision, Libertas Omnibus NFT holdings, ZKsync Lite activity, and donations to Gitcoin. 

To ensure fairness and prevent bots, a careful sybil detection method is applied. This method groups EOAs accounts that have common funding patterns or reuse deposit addresses into groups. Groups with more than 20 EOAs were filtered out to eliminate potential bots.