High Variability of Airdrop Is A Deliberate Choice: ZK Nation

The team behind ZKsync has addressed some of the community’s concerns over the ZK token airdrop ahead of claim day.

Ethereum layer 2 rollup ZKsync unveiled plans to airdrop 17.5% of its upcoming ZK token’s supply to the community – an allocation of 3.67 billion tokens across 695,232 wallets. While the ZKsync team dubbed the distribution “the mother of all drops,” it was met with poor reception from some members of the community.

Some of the biggest criticisms of the proposed airdrop were the so-called unfair allocations to genuine users and the fact that a number of Sybil accounts seemingly qualified to receive a large share of tokens. A Sybil account refers to one user creating multiple wallets to be eligible for a higher token distribution.

“Our airdrop design is unconventional and has its imperfections. But we are proud of the path we’ve chosen and believe we made reasonable tradeoffs,” said ZK Nation, an initiative that consists of members of the ZKsync community, including technical experts and security experts. 

ZK Nation acknowledged that many people were upset after receiving a lower than anticipated allocation, but argued that they had not identified any major issues after looking into reports and double-checking data. 

However, the team noted that its “communication about the nuances of the airdrop design was not clear enough” and published an updated Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document to address some of the questions around the airdrop.

In the document, ZK Nation explained that 89% of the allocation earmarked for ZKsync users depended on a combination of how many of the seven eligibility criteria were met, time-weighted average balance (TWAB) of the amount bridged onto ZKsync Era over the 12 months before March 24, 2024, and a bonus multiplier if the wallet was part of a group of early ETH adopters or holders of top ZKsync native NFTs and tokens.

The team also emphasized that transaction volume alone had no impact on the size of allocations to users. They noted that they used value scaling, multipliers and explicit Sybil detection in order to lower the number of people falsely flagged as bots, even at the expense of a greater number of Sybils passing through the filters.

In response to one user who called for ZKsync to reallocate the proposed distribution instead of “wasting allocations” on undeserving users like Sybil farmers, ZK Nation said that “the high variability of the airdrop with 100x difference between the highest and lowest allocations is a deliberate choice.”

The team explained that if they were to increase the amount of eligible accounts, most of those accounts would still be smart industrial Sybils, and equally dividing 3.6 billion tokens among 1.5 million users would have resulted in a distribution of just 2,450 ZK tokens to each organic account. 

“Most people would dump, forget, and move on to the next thing. No one would care,” said ZK Nation.

“Now, instead, tens of thousands of organic users received a very substantial allocation.”

Some of those larger allocations went to ZKSync native protocols like zkSwap finance and SyncSwap, which were each allocated 5.6 million ZK tokens. The Aave DAO is also eligible for 8 million ZK tokens, which the DAO now intends to redistribute to Aave users.

At the time of writing, data from Nansen shows there were 250,000 active addresses and 537,000 transactions on ZKsync over the last 24 hours. Claiming tokens in the ZKsync airdrop is set to commence on June 17.