Jessy, Golden Finance
Known as the largest airdrop in Ethereum Layer2, the airdrop of zkSync’s token ZK has finally landed. Although the lucky users who received the airdrop said, “This is the largest airdrop I have ever received in my career,” many users, active communities, and project owners said they did not receive the airdrop.
Users who meet the zkSync airdrop criteria roughly account for 10% of the total number of interactions. According to statistics, there are approximately 6 million on-chain interactive users of zkSync, and approximately 690,000 people have received airdrops, of which the highest number can receive 100,000 ZKs, and the lowest number can receive 917 ZKs. Currently, based on over-the-counter prices, the price of a ZK token is approximately 0.4U.
Not only is the airdrop ratio small, users have also questioned the fairness of the airdrop through various signs, and the insider trading of the founding team. Users who have been accustomed to PUA by the project also realized in the zkSync airdrop incident that the airdrop dream is about to end.
On-chain asset value and time have a higher weight
According to official news, 17.5% of the total number of ZK tokens will be used for airdrops. Among them, 89% are distributed to individual users, who have traded on zkSync and reached the activity threshold. Another 11% are awarded to ecosystem contributors, which refers to individuals, developers, researchers, communities and companies who have contributed to the ZKsync ecosystem and protocol through development, publicity or education.
The snapshot date distributed to ordinary users is 00:00:00 UTC on March 24, 2024. In terms of rules, 7 rules are set first to screen users. Users must meet at least one rule to enter the next stage of screening. The rules for the initial screening are as follows:
1. Interact with at least 10 non-token smart contracts on ZKsync Era. (Eligible contracts must be active for at least 30 days)
2. Payers who have used at least 5 transactions on ZKsync Era.
3. At least 10 different ERC-20 tokens were traded on the ZKsync Era DEX.
4. Provide any amount of liquidity to DEXs and lending protocols tracked on ZKsync Era.
5. Provide any amount of liquidity to DEXs and lending protocols tracked on ZKsync Era.
6. Active on ZKsync Lite for more than 3 months before ZKsync Era mainnet.
7. Donate to Gitcoin through rounds on ZKsync Lite.
After the initial screening, the second step will be to count the number of users' on-chain assets, mainly based on the amount sent to ZKsync Era and the length of time these crypto assets stay in the wallet. The wallet balance and assets in the DeFi protocol are all included in the calculation, where the weight of assets in DeFi is twice the wallet balance, and the total number of days calculated is 366 days before the snapshot date.
In the third step, each eligible address will be weighted multiplied according to the amount of on-chain activity. The following are the activities that are officially considered to have a high contribution to the ecosystem:
1. Save one of the following ZKsync native NFT collectibles in a snapshot: Dudiez, Hue, Moody Mights, Webears, ZKPENGZ, zkSkulls, or zkVeggies.
2. Hold at least $50 in one of the following ZKsync native ERC-20 tokens at the time of the snapshot: AAI, HOLD, KOI, MEOW, MUTE, RF, ZF, ZORRO.
3. Smart contract wallet created through ZKsync Era native account abstraction.
4.Hold at least 50% of the ARB/OP/ENS airdrop for more than 90 days after receiving it.
5. Interacted with an eligible Ethereum smart contract at least twice in the top 1,000 addresses. An eligible contract is one that spends at least 100 ETH in transaction fees
After this step, each address will be allocated tokens, and the address must meet the minimum requirement of 450 ZK and the maximum requirement of 100,000 ZK. Tokens of addresses with less than 450 ZK will be recycled back to the pool. Excess tokens of addresses with more than 100,000 ZK will also be recycled back to the pool. These tokens will then be redistributed to bring the minimum allocation to 917 ZK.
After the first three steps of screening, the official will conduct a witch detection in qualified addresses. There are two detection criteria. The first is that the exchange deposit address is repeated. If two addresses send encrypted assets to the same deposit address, they are likely to be judged as witches. The second is to detect the source of funds, that is, the address correlation. If multiple addresses have transfers and other correlations, they are likely to be judged as witches.
Through the setting of the above rules, we can find that ZKsync gives greater weight to on-chain interactions, on-chain asset value, and time when setting airdrop rules.
According to the rules, there is nothing wrong with ZKsync's airdrop rules. At most, the rules are relatively strict and there are few users who meet the requirements.
This alone is unlikely to cause widespread criticism. The fundamental reason why the ZKsync airdrop distribution was widely questioned and complained about is that during the airdrop distribution process, the official did not seem to strictly follow the above rules to reward users, and even new wallets appeared without any interaction, which was suspected to be the project party's insider trading. Some teams with real projects on its chain, that is, ecological contributors, said that they did not receive airdrops.
A large number of zero-transaction accounts received airdrops
Element, the NFT exchange on ZKsync, failed to receive an airdrop. Its official X account responded to comments saying, "As the largest NFT trading market on zkSync, we did not receive any airdrops. Are you kidding me?"
According to the results published by ZKsync, a total of 67 on-chain projects received airdrops in varying amounts. The details are as follows:
A netizen summarized the airdrops received by 67 projects on the zkSync chain and found that they included some shell projects and insider trading projects by the project owners.
For example, the AAVE project was not listed on zkSync, but it was given 8 million tokens. The ABSTRACT FOUNDATION project received more than 5 million tokens, but its official website and account number X could not be found. It is highly suspected that the project party was insider trading. In response to the doubts about the ABSTRACT FOUNDATION project receiving airdrops, the ZKsync ecosystem DEX zkSwap Finance came out to clarify the facts. The address belongs to zkSwap and is the project development token allocated by ZKsync. zkSwap emphasized that this part of the tokens will be used to develop the protocol and community.
However, this explanation did not quell users’ doubts. In the eyes of users, the project team seemed to have released a batch of its own accounts to obtain airdrops.
User X @riyuexiaochu also did some data analysis, saying that ZKsync used a large amount of insider trading to harvest, “Evidence 1: In the three months before the airdrop, the number of user addresses nearly doubled.
Normal users will consider cross-chain bridge as a must-do task. However, during this event, the number of users doubled, and the amount of deposits was half of the previous amount. The final published rules do not require the cross-chain amount to be counted. This shows that these addresses not only grasped the airdrop time, but also were very familiar with the rules.
Evidence 2: It was not enough for the project owner to use their own insider trading to increase activity, they also directly sent the funds to an address with zero transfers.
According to the panel created by DUNE user @ realpeha, users with 0 transactions and a large number of users with 1 transaction received the airdrop.
For example, the account "0x65f8dfc419b418ae82f289059d038428d038cd9a" obtained 917 ZKs, and the wallet address had 0 interactions and 0 balances regardless of the Ethereum mainnet, litenet, or eranet.
According to the analysis of all 690,000 accounts that received airdrops by X user @lope40623671, the average value of ZK airdrops was 4924, the median was 1533, and the number of addresses with tokens between 1000 and 3000 was the largest, which means that half of the addresses received less than 1533 tokens.
The lowest number of tokens is 917, the highest is 160495, and the maximum and minimum difference is 159578, a difference of 175 times. Most addresses have relatively low numbers of tokens.
Another point that has been questioned is whether zkSync’s anti-witch feature is really effective. Does it protect against real witches? Or does it use this as an excuse to filter out real users?
According to a post by witch hunter Artemis on the X platform, a witch user who participated in the Arbitrum airdrop and made a profit of $4.2 million is still eligible to receive nearly 1,000,000 ZK tokens with more than 3,000 wallet addresses.
According to further digging by Artemis, some insider traders obtained more than 2 million ZK tokens by depositing the same Ethereum funds on the same day, with each wallet receiving an average of 15,000 ZK tokens. More importantly, almost all accounts were marked on the witch list of @LayerZero_Labs.
In response to the above questions, zkSync officially replied, "The team is still working on in-depth research on MOAD and all the questions raised by the community. Understandably, everyone has a lot of questions. We will answer these questions in a completely transparent and detailed manner. This will take more time. Please be patient."
The community is very dissatisfied with the official response that does not directly address the problem. In the process of airdrops, users have actually been accustomed to PUA, and even acquiesced to the "unspoken rules" such as the team's insider trading. However, zkSync's PUA this time seems to be a warning to everyone that the more you acquiesce, the more rampant the project owners will become. The rights that should belong to users will be eroded inch by inch by the project owners in their concessions.
