zkSync Airdrop: Almost Half of ZK Tokens Claimed Amid Tech Issues and Sybil Backlash

Ethereum scaling solution zkSync has run into some issues during its highly anticipated and controversial ZK token airdrop.

"The network is currently under high load. Some RPC services may experience degraded performance," the team wrote on Twitter Monday morning. At the time of writing, the team has not yet said that the issues have been resolved.

But despite the ongoing issues, ZK Nation—the community created to govern the ecosystem and token—said 45% of the airdropped tokens had already been claimed by more than 225,000 wallets.

"It's a Monday," they joked, "don't you have to work?"

The ZK Nation team has spent the better part of the weekend responding to angry community members on Twitter and updating its Frequently Asked Questions documentation about the way Sybil detection was used to determine eligibility.

Sybil attacks happen when a single user creates and controls a large number of accounts or wallets and uses them to gain outsized influence. But a very vocal group of users say the Sybil detection still let dodgy wallets through.

ZK Nation has defended the way it performed the check, saying it was wary of being overly strict at the risk of excluding real users.

Very sophisticated Sybil wallets, "fund accounts from many distinct exchange addresses, never interact with each other, use randomized amounts, and use software to randomize daily patterns of human behavior, and even perform activities unique to the project (for example, using zkSync paymasters),” ZK Nation wrote in its FAQ.

This first wave of the airdrop, which ends on January 3, 2025, will distribute tokens to zkSync Era users, ZK Quest participants, security researchers, moderators, GitHub developers, $DEGEN and $BONSAI airdrop recipients, Crypto The Game participants, and holders of Pudgy Penguin and Milady Maker NFTs.

The second wave kicks off next week, on June 24, and will extend the airdrop to zkSync native project and external contributors and the protocol guild.

Although GitHub contributors can check their eligibility with their username for the developer platform, they will need to associate their username with a crypto wallet address before claiming their ZK tokens, according to ZK Nation.

Binance ZK token listing

Meanwhile, Binance has flagged that it's dealing with issues of its own as it races to open trading for ZK.

"Our tech team is fixing it urgently, and will be recovered before trading starts," the exchange wrote on Twitter. "Deposits will be credited once the block height catches up."

Binance later said that the ZK listing would be postponed until the tech issues could be resolved. But ZK is already trading on other exchanges and has seen its price drop 23% to $0.2413 since it went live

The plan was to allow users to deposit ZK into their wallets "in preparation for trading," the company wrote. It will initially list trading pairs for ZK with Bitcoin (BTC), Tether (USDT), First Digital USD (FDUSD), and the Turkish Lyra (TRY).

Binance explained in its blog post that TRY does indeed refer to fiat currency—not Try.Finance's TRY token.

The company will also be giving away up to 10.5 million ZK tokens away to as many as 52,000 of its users through the Binance ZK Token Distribution Program, aimed to address "ongoing concerns from the community around the ZK token distribution."

Binance is specifically giving away tokens to wallets that are not otherwise eligible for ZK tokens, but have completed at least 50 transactions on the zkSync Era L2—excluding self-transfers.

The ZK token airdrop has been facing criticism from the community for not including enough measures to prevent a Sybil attack.