In June, airdrops came one after another. After LayerZero, another star project, ZkSync, took over the airdrop baton. However, unlike LayerZero, the ZkSync airdrop did not adopt extremely strict witch screening. Despite facing community disputes and various controversies, exchanges such as Binance and Bitget announced the launch of ZK one after another, and the weakening price also involved ZK in a larger whirlpool of public opinion.
First, why is ZK still not popular even though it is so popular? The main reason is the airdrop
Let's start with the token distribution: the total number of tokens is 21 billion, and the airdrop accounts for 17.5% of the total. A total of 3.675 billion tokens were airdropped this time. Calculated at the current price of 0.25, the total value of the airdrop is 940 million US dollars. However, the project's airdrop rules are very novel, directly throwing out unexpected new rules, POW to POS, hitting the studio's vital point with one blow, and killing most of the studios that pursue extreme capital utilization. Didn't make money from the coins? But after waiting for 4 years, it's enough for the bull and bear cycles!
Secondly, the airdrop details gave users a big blow: from the perspective of the entire quota composition, the airdrop has three parts, one is qualification review, the second is basic allocation, and the third is the multiplier effect.
From the perspective of qualification review, airdrop qualifications are not strict. Although the thresholds for owning NFT and having interacted with others are complicated, they are mostly basic operations. But from the perspective of allocation, there is a lot of knowledge.
Judging from the formula, accounts with more airdrops have either been in existence for a long time or have more fund balances, and it is better to have both. As for the multiplier, the 5 multipliers are more stringent and difficult to figure out, and are almost tailor-made for rat trading.
Continuing with the studio mentioned above, let’s take an example: According to Seanzhao1105 of the X platform, it used 6,000 accounts, including 400 manual accounts and 5,600 program accounts, with a total investment of US$200,000, but in the end only 35 addresses received the airdrop.
In addition, "Meeting one or more of the above airdrop criteria does not constitute a legal right or requirement to receive an airdrop, and all decisions related to airdrop allocation are made at the sole discretion of the ZKsync Association." Isn't this a real-life version of "the merchant's final right of interpretation"? In addition to the broad Sybil standards, the ZKsync airdrop Sybil address has skyrocketed due to the non-use of Layerzero's Sybil library. Further analysis of the addresses that received airdrops shows that the accounts are quite concentrated. According to community statistics, 9,203 addresses received 23.9% of the total airdrops.
Second, ZK’s online performance is as I expected. How much room for growth will it have in the future?
ZKsync (ZK) airdrop is officially open for claiming at 15:00. The claiming status before the launch is as follows:
Over 225,000 addresses claimed over 45% of the airdropped ZK tokens in less than 2 hours.
Although BN postponed the launch time twice, originally scheduled for 16:00, postponed once to 17:00, and then announced again to 18:00, judging from the time, the airdrop is part of the reason. In addition, the token unlocking is only fully unlocked by airdrop, although the current coin price is not very good, 50% lower than the off-market. However, ZK is not doing such a big project to reverse the studio's big hair. Data shows that the opening price of ZK on the chain reached a high of 0.4236 US dollars, and it has fallen back to 0.29 US dollars after the launch, a drop of 30% after the launch. Perhaps affected by this, Binance and Bitget subsequently announced the postponement of the launch of ZK. Binance opened at 0.295 US dollars and is now quoted at 0.20 US dollars, which is much lower than the previous market expectations. But it is also within the expected price of my article yesterday.
Regarding the future space of ZK, we can compare the historical performance and market value of the four kings. Many people compared ZK with OP and ARB in the early stage. Let's look at the market value. OP has a market value of 2.1 billion and ARB has a market value of 2.1 billion. At first glance, ZK may have more than 2 times the space, and the impact price is around 0.6. But none of them have as many total tokens as ZK! Judging from the total amount of tokens alone, ZK's 3.6 billion token airdrops are actually much larger than OP, ARB and STARK. ZK has doubled its market value to 10 billion. No matter how long this project has existed in the early stage, it is now a new coin!
In addition, the ecosystem was mentioned yesterday as a criticism. Although TVL seems to have made a lot of money and GAS revenue is also very high, its profit capture ability is facing a significant decline. Compared with OP, ARB and other projects with better network effects, zkSync's ecosystem is in an obvious dilemma. Although there are more than 243 projects, there is a lack of top DAPPs.
In addition, as the gas price of Ethereum decreases after the upgrade, the transaction cost of zkSync also decreases. Officials revealed that the decrease is about 10-20 times, which means that profitability will be tested again.
3. Where is ZK’s path to breaking out of the circle?
As Optimism, Arbitrum, Starknet, Base, Scroll, and more L2 chains join the PVP battle for market dominance, it is important to win this race. Since the successful upgrade of Dencun, the daily transaction volume of Ethereum rollup has grown to 2 to 3 times that of before.
Currently, L2beat has launched more than 50 projects, and new L2s will continue to be launched in the future. zkSync has the characteristics of "faster, safer, and cheaper". zkSync will provide excellent scalability, performance, and security, enhance the overall user experience, and distinguish itself from other systems that are usually classified as "L2". Vitalik once said, "ZK is obviously the ultimate goal."
At present, ZK technology is superior to OP technology. Why?
Ways of identifying:
OP first assumes that the transaction is valid by default unless someone submits evidence that a transaction is invalid. This requires continuous monitoring by off-chain users and nodes to ensure that RollupOperator does not do evil, and a 7-day transaction final confirmation challenge period;
ZK generates a concise proof to ensure the validity of transactions in a batch without having to check each transaction one by one.
safety:
OP assumes that the transaction is valid by default, which has certain risks; ZK's verification method based on zero-knowledge proof provides it with higher security because it needs to generate a proof to ensure the validity of the transaction.
Throughput and Performance:
OP has a faster off-chain transaction processing speed, but on-chain verification may take longer because it needs to wait for the challenge cycle m of the fraud proof.
ZK requires certain computing resources to generate zero-knowledge proofs, but the on-chain verification speed is fast, and once the proof is generated on the main chain, it can be quickly verified.
I personally believe that ZK technology is the foundational infrastructure for the next generation of Mass Adoption and the core catalyst for the competition among the next generation of application chains. “ZK Scaling” will occupy a major narrative position in the second half of 2024.
4. What other potential airdrops are there after ZK?
After the zkSync airdrop incident, the airdrop of the first-level project seems to have lost its meaning. This is a new era. The airdrop cost of the second-level project is small, the airdrop is fast, and the scalability is strong.
First is Berachain. Old fans all know that there was a project investment research before: Berachain, the popular public chain: Berachain’s benefit effect surpasses Luna? Why is there 100 times more room?
Berachain is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible L1 built on Cosmos SDK. Here is the interaction:
Add Berachain Artio to your wallet: https://chainlist.org/chain/80085
Connect wallet
Add Berachain Artio to Metamask
Approve and switch
Get test tokens:
Visit: https://artio.faucet.berachain.com/
Enter wallet address
Click on “Drip Tokens”
On-chain interaction:
Visit: https://artio.bex.berachain.com/swap
Connect your wallet and secure the Artio testnet
Exchange HONEY, STGUSDC, WBTC
Add LP:
Visit: https://artio.bex.berachain.com/pool
Select a pool and click Add
Enter the amount and confirm LP addition
Casting Honey:
Visit and connect your wallet: https://artio.honey.berachain.com/
Enter the amount of STGUSDC and approve the minting of Honey
To redeem, please follow the reverse steps in the Redeem section
Borrowing:
Visit and connect your wallet: https://artio.bend.berachain.com/
Select "Deposit" next to WBTC
Approve and provide funds and click "Borrow"
Enter the amount of Honey you want to borrow
Perpetual:
Visit: https://artio.berps.berachain.com/berpetuals
Connect your wallet and select a trading partner
Make a deal
Galxe Mission:
Visit and log in: http://galxe.com/Berachain/campaign/
Complete as many tasks as possible
Will update later:
Hyperlane (the first interoperability layer enabling you to connect any blockchain permissionlessly), Blast (DistrictOne), Initia
(Enables L2 to utilize EVM, WasmVM, or MoveVM while facilitating seamless messaging and bridging between them);
