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ZkSync faces backlash amid token launch controversy
Ethereum’s Layer-2 Zero-Knowledge (ZK) scaling solution, zkSync, is facing backlash from the crypto community following the recent announcement of the ZK token airdrop. Community members have expressed concerns about the lack of anti-Sybil filters and the “unfair” distribution of tokens.
ZkSync takes on the game
On Tuesday, zkSync announced the upcoming airdrop of its ZK token and distribution plan. According to the announcement, 17.5% of ZK’s supply of 21 billion tokens will be distributed to 695,000 eligible individuals wallets on June 17th.
Additionally, 33.3% of the token supply would be distributed between the project team and investors. The award was intended to reward early adopters and long-time supporters of the zkSync community.
Annoucement of the ZK token. Source: ZK Nation on X
According to the post, eligible users could receive up to 100,000 ZK tokens depending on the criteria they met before the March 25 snapshot. However, the project came under criticism after users started checking their own allocation.
Online reports revealed that some community members were unhappy with their rewards. Despite being long-term active users, many investors said they received a lower token allocation than others with less activity.
Likewise, several users have complained that they are not eligible for the airdrop despite their transaction volume and history and meeting the criteria. An X user shared being in the top 0.04% of wallets and receiving only 1,023 ZK tokens, while wallets with significantly less activity recorded after the snapshot got the maximum allocation.
Various top-tier zkSync-based projects expressed disappointment after not being included. zkApes NFT project and NFT market item shared they had not received any airdrops despite generating between $15 and $20 million in gas fees for the network.
Additionally, zkApes, Element NFT, and other projects have formed a coalition to “keep pressure” on the zkSync team and negotiate an allocation of tokens, which would be distributed among their communities. Critics have expressed their desire for “transparency and fairness”.
A lack of anti-Sybil filter?
Mudit Gupta, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Polygon Labs, called the case of the “most farmable and cultivated air launch ever.” Gupta pointed out the lack of anti-Sybil filters and stated that “anyone who knew the criteria could easily have made crap out of it.”
Likewise, Adam Cochran, partner at Cinneamhain Ventures, consider the airdrop was not well planned from Sybil’s point of view. He stressed that the criteria were “easy to miss as a real user and easy to hit as a farmer”.
Many users believed that the controversial criteria were not the responsibility of zkSync but that the crypto analytics firm Nansen was to blame. However, Nansen clarified that they had not been involved in the launch of ZK.
In a post X, the company declared who have previously provided data to Matter Labs, the development company behind zkSync. The information provided included data on the wallets of some whales and known scammers. Furthermore, they explained that they did not do any anti-Sybiling nor did they provide any advice on token allocation.
It is worth noting that the project decided not to use any anti-Sybil criteria for the launch as it was considered an “incomplete approach”.
(…) There is a temptation to eliminate bot swarms by applying strict Sybil criteria. But Sybil detection often excludes real users with arbitrary filters. This was an incomplete approach for the ZK airdrop. The ZK airdrop focuses on identifying real users using a human-first approach.
According to online reports, Sybil wallets are estimated to receive around $135 million worth of ZK tokens from airdrop, based on an initial list provided by LayerZero Labs. The Sybil list has since been discarded by Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero.
ETH is trading at $3,591 in the weekly chart. Source: ETHUSDT on TradingView
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