Original | Odaily Planet Daily
Author | Nanzhi
Yesterday, zkSync announced that it will conduct an airdrop next week and open airdrop inquiries. The 4-year interactive long-distance race has finally reached the end. However, compared with the previous Layer 2 such as Optimism, Arbitrum, etc., the proportion of zkSync addresses eligible for airdrops is significantly lower. There are 6, 826, 968 addresses on the zkSync chain, and the number of qualified addresses is 695, 232, accounting for about 10%. According to community statistics, 9203 addresses received 23.9% of the total airdrops.
Subsequently, zkSync officially released the airdrop details. From the details, it can be seen that although the airdrop rules are not "strict", they are "biased" compared to the conventional standards, and the community is increasingly questioning whether zkSync is insider trading.
Why are the number of eligible addresses so small?
Before zkSync officially announced the airdrop rules, Nansen, TrustGo or some crypto KOLs had estimated the number of airdrop recipients. In TrustGo's report, 2.9 million addresses reached the qualified score, and even under strict standards, 2.05 million addresses met the requirements. For example, crypto KOL @DefiWimar concluded through analyzing the ZK Nation website code that the number of addresses eligible for zkSync airdrops will reach 1,650,351.
But the final number of qualified addresses is far less than the predicted value. Why? One of the main reasons is that zkSync sets more niche conditions than before. Let’s first look at a benchmark address given in TrustGo’s previous report, which ranks 500,000th under its model:
Interaction amount: $29,700;
Cross-chain amount: USD 3,356;
Active months: 11 months;
Tx number: 182;
Number of independent contract interactions: 27;
Creation time: 312 days;
However, this benchmark address only triggered one of the seven necessary conditions set by zkSync. Generally speaking, the core criteria for airdrops are the level of activity, duration, and amount of funds of interactions, but zkSync has set seven thresholds. The conditions for the Era mainnet are interacting with 10 contracts, providing liquidity, using Paymaster, trading 10 ERC 20 tokens, and holding the magic lamp NFT. These conditions exclude most of the "lottery numbers".
While a zkSync report compiled by Odaily in April noted that “Paymaster and LIBERTAS OMNIBUS COLLECTION become important standards for differentiation,” the release date was after the snapshot time.
After passing the first hurdle, zkSync also sets innovative fund retention conditions as the core calculation parameter for airdrop allocation.
Caught in a rat trading scandal
If the rules are just strict or there are some unconventional practices, it would still be within the acceptable range of the community. However, a series of mysterious operations by zkSync have caused the voices of doubt to grow louder.
Opaque decision-making power
First of all, zkSync sets 7 necessary conditions, and one of them must be met before entering the subsequent calculation. However, zkSync emphasizes in the detailed document:
Meeting one or more of the above airdrop criteria does not constitute a legal right or claim to receive an airdrop, and all decisions regarding airdrop allocations are made at the sole discretion of the ZKSync Association.
This wording has greatly aroused the dissatisfaction of community users, and many users have questioned that zkSync's move is essentially to arrange insider trading and snatch the tokens that users deserve.
In addition, zkSync stated at the end of the document that addresses that meet the airdrop conditions but have less than 450 tokens will have their allocated tokens reclaimed, which is not a problem of too little but unequal distribution, further stimulating community conflicts.
Nansen distances himself from the issue
After a large number of addresses were screened out of the airdrop range, some users accused Nansen of taking anti-Sybil measures and address screening for zkSync, causing it to lose its airdrop qualifications.
Upon receiving this rumor, Nansen immediately issued a statement to distance himself from the matter, saying: “We provided Matter Labs with data on some specific wallets, such as whale users and known scammers. However, we did not take anti-witch measures or make recommendations on the airdrop allocation itself.”
Suspicious addresses frequently appear, but the authorities have no direct response
After the airdrop link was made public, various screenshots showing off their wealth began to circulate in the community. However, a mysterious address 0xF1802d9a70Bdc6F6EffD65d44b33226eE0E6A821 triggered direct doubts from the community. In the zkSync airdrop for ordinary users, the upper limit of the airdrop was 100,000 tokens, and this address received 5.64 million tokens. In addition to this address, there are many addresses with low activity but high token allocations circulating in the community.
In this regard, neither the official account of zkSync nor the account of ZKNation responded. 80 minutes later, 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 token will be used to develop the protocol and community, which finally calmed the doubts.
However, not all questions have been answered. Many known Sybil addresses that had already been identified still received airdrops from zkSync, including the Arbitrum Sybil that was on the list more than a year ago and the recent LayerZero Sybil.
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.
Later, according to Artemis's further digging, 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.
However, as with zkSwap, the official account did not respond to any questions, and only zkSync Alex continued to retweet positive comments about the airdrop.
The voice of resistance continues
zkSync’s silence continues to fuel the community’s boycott sentiment. Today, calls were made for major exchanges not to list zkSync tokens and to return the ZK name to polyhedra. However, the possibility of zkSync listening to the community’s call and revising the airdrop rules and scope is almost zero.
However, looking back at the “staking” interaction process from the final result, Starknet’s 0.005 ETH threshold and zkSync’s fund retention calculation rules make it increasingly unlikely that one will win large airdrops simply by the number and duration of interactions. The fund threshold requirements are getting higher and higher, which is essentially the same as the fund points system. The golden age of interaction may come to an end with zkSync.
