How to save the zkSync airdrop: A practical guide to decentralization

Author: CC2 Source: X, CC2 Ventures Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

Known as the largest airdrop of Ethereum Layer2, the airdrop of zkSync's token ZK has finally landed, but many users, active communities, and project parties said that they did not receive the airdrop. Related reading: Rat trading, low airdrop rate, and unfollowed rules shattered the dream of the Mao Party zkSync

Merkly consultant CC2 Ventures published an article "How to save the zkSync airdrop", the full text translated by Jinse Finance is as follows:

• Remove projects that have not yet deployed on zkSync from the 17.5% "airdrop" share - these projects will get their share after the "ecosystem incentive" goes online.

• Increase the initial airdrop amount by 3.5%.

These two steps increase the initial allocation to “users” to 20.3% (not 21% because some zkSync native projects take 0.7% which is reasonable).

• Set the maximum eligible amount to 85,000 $ZK - not a huge reduction, but enough to redistribute to ineligible addresses for maximum decentralization.

The criteria for the initial $ZK airdrop was generally reasonable - liquidity providers, time-weighted asset holders, Memecoin traders and holders were all rewarded greatly (in yuan), and instead of penalizing them further:

We now have an extra 6% to use. I haven't actually calculated it, but the max eligible wallet amount is reduced by 15,000 via this tweet: https://x.com/Shishir42069/status/1800538362782052441 Arbitrum/3rd Party Sybil Filtering + Redistribution of Undeployed zkSync Project zkSync launches at slightly above Arbitrum FDV (9.87B FDV at $0.47 per $ZK). 6% supply reallocation is worth about $592M. Could be as high as 8%. This depends on the max wallet reduction of 15,000 and the amount of Sybil filtering.

After extensive Sybil filtering, we made an additional 300,000 addresses eligible. Each new address (not previously eligible) received approximately 1973 $ZK tokens - some more, some less.

We are now applying an Arbitrum-like points system to the 300,000 wallets that were previously ineligible:

• Connected to zkSync Lite before zkSync Era launch

• Performed 3 Txs on zkSync lite before zkSync Era launch

• Divided the transaction volume on Era into 1k, 10k, 25k and 100k

• Divided the number of transactions on Era into 10, 25, 50, 100, 250

• Divided the number of transaction months on Era into 3, 6, 12

Adjust the percentages and points system until it "makes sense" and includes at least 1 million addresses as a baseline at the end.

You did it.

There will still be some people who are unhappy because zkSync has 8 million addresses and not everyone will qualify (survival of the fittest), but now your initial circulating supply is more decentralized.

Why do you care about my opinion? Because I helped design the $ZKJ (Polyhedra) airdrop to Merkly users, with over 65,000 eligible addresses and only 500,000 $ZKJ tokens to use.

Study the very positive response: https://x.com/merkly_com/status/1785272557408530811

Again I didn't crunch the numbers for all the steps above - they could be wildly inaccurate - but the situation is definitely salvageable if you apply some of the steps mentioned.