ZKsync airdrop controversy: eccentric rules raise questions, and insider trading controversy arises

Original title: "ZKsync is caught in a rat warehouse storm: airdrop conditions are biased, and witch addresses receive a large number of airdrops"

Original author: Nan Zhi, Odaily Planet Daily

Yesterday, ZKsync announced that it will conduct airdrops next week and open airdrop inquiries. The 4-year interactive long-distance race has finally reached the end. However, compared with the previous Layer 2s such as Optimism and Arbitrum, the proportion of addresses eligible for airdrops in ZKsync 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.

Afterwards, ZKsync officially released the airdrop rules. From the rules, it can be seen that although the airdrop rules are not "strict", they are "unconventional" compared to the conventional standards. The community is questioning whether ZKsync is a rat trader.

Why are the number of qualified addresses so small?

Before ZKsync officially announced the airdrop rules, Nansen, TrustGo or some crypto KOLs had made estimates of the number of airdrops. In TrustGo's report, 2.9 million addresses reached the qualified score line, 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 extreme 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: US$29,700; · Cross-chain amount: US$3,356; · Active months: 11 months; · Number of Tx: 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 the interaction, but ZKsync has set seven thresholds, of which the conditions for the Era mainnet are interacting with 10 contracts, providing liquidity, using Paymaster, trading 10 ERC 20 tokens, and holding a magic lamp. NFT, these few rules exclude most of the "lottery numbers".

Although a ZKsync report compiled by Odaily in April pointed out that "Paymaster and LIBERTAS OMNIBUS COLLECTION have become important standards for differentiation", the release date is after the snapshot time.

After passing the first threshold, ZKsync also set innovative fund retention conditions as the core calculation parameter for airdrop allocation.

Caught in the rat warehouse storm

If it is just strict rules or a certain degree of side door, it is still within the acceptable range of the community, but ZKsync's series of mysterious operations have made the voice of doubt increasingly high.

Opaque decision-making power

First, ZKsync set 7 necessary conditions, and one must be met before entering the subsequent calculation. However, ZKsync emphasized in the detailed document:

Meeting one or more of the above airdrop criteria does not mean a legal right or requirement to receive an airdrop, and all decisions related to airdrop allocation are made by the ZKSync Association at its own discretion.

This wording greatly aroused the dissatisfaction of community users, and many users questioned that ZKsync's move was essentially to arrange a rat warehouse and snatch the tokens that users deserved.

In addition, ZKsync stated at the end of the document that the tokens allocated to addresses that meet the airdrop conditions but have less than 450 tokens will be recycled, which is not a problem of too few but uneven distribution, further stimulating community conflicts.

Nansen severance

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, nor did we make recommendations on the airdrop allocation itself."

Suspicious addresses frequently appeared, but the official did not respond directly

After the airdrop link was made public, various screenshots of showing off wealth began to spread in the community. However, a mysterious address 0xF1802d9a70Bdc6F6EffD65d44b33226eE0E6A821 aroused direct doubts from the community. In the ZKsync airdrop for ordinary users, the airdrop limit 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 ultra-high token allocations circulating in the community.

In response, neither the ZKsync official account nor the ZKNation account responded. 80 minutes later, the 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 tokens will be used to develop the protocol and community, which finally calmed the doubts.

However, not all questions have been answered. Many known witch addresses that have been checked out have still received ZKsync airdrops, including the Arbitrum witch that was listed more than a year ago and the recent LayerZero witch.

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.

After that, according to further digging by Artemis, some rat warehouses received 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, consistent with the situation of zkSwap, the official account did not respond to any questions, and only ZKsync CEO Alex continued to forward positive comments about the airdrop.

The voice of boycott has not stopped

ZKsync's silence continues to fuel the community's boycott sentiment. Today, calls for major exchanges not to list ZK (ZKsync) tokens and return the ZK name to polyhedra are gradually spreading, but the possibility that ZKsync will listen to the community's voice and revise the airdrop rules and scope is almost zero.

But looking back at the "money-rolling" interaction process from the final result, Starknet's 0.005 ETH threshold and ZKsync's fund retention calculation rules make it increasingly unlikely to win large airdrops simply by the number and duration of interactions, and the fund threshold requirements are getting higher and higher. In essence, it is the same as the fund points system. The golden age of interaction may end with ZKsync.

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