Top 41% ZKsync airdrop recipients hit sell

Almost half of the top recipients of ZKsync’s airdrop liquidate their governance tokens on day one.

Data from Nansen shows that more than 41% of 10,000 wallets have sold their entire allocations from the Ethereum scaling zero-knowledge (ZK) protocol ZKsync.

According to the analytics firm, more than 4,160 addresses went up for sale after claiming the ZK token. Approximately 30 percent of top buyers sold partial allocations, and less than 29 percent of claimants still held tokens after the airdrop.

As Crypto.news previously reported, ZK token sales resulted in a one percent drop in the price of the coin, which was trading around 20 cents at the time of writing. Nansen reported that airdrop requesters sold almost $500 million worth of ZK on the open market, but top buyers compromised on some of the total distribution plan.

ZKsync plans to share 3.67 billion tokens with 695,232 addresses; This means the first 10,000 wallets will receive only 1.44% of the allocation. As of June 17, less than half of eligible wallets have claimed less than 50% of the airdrop.

ZK token claims for the first 10,000 wallets | Source: Nansen ZKsync Are ZK dealers Sybil farmers?

Missing Sybil filtering was singled out as one of the biggest problems with ZKsync’s airdrop. Sybil airdrop farming occurs when a single user uses hundreds or even thousands of wallets to collect protocol activity.

The ultimate goal is to collect as many tokens as possible from the airdrop that would otherwise go to single-user wallets and eventually dump them following token listings on crypto exchanges.

Members of the crypto community have been complaining about this practice for a long time. While protocols like LayerZero double down on preventing Sybil from participating, ZKsync has taken a different approach.

Analysts noted that several Sybil addresses blacklisted for LayerZero’s airdrop received thousands of ZK tokens. However, a Nansen representative told crypto.news that it remains unclear whether Sybil farmers are mostly behind the token dumps.

Whatever the case, ZKsync developer Matter Labs doesn’t seem too bothered by this activity. The firm’s CEO, Alex Gluchowski, reportedly said that more airdropped tokens onto open markets means more ZK coins becoming available to actual government participants.