Jun 18, 2024 at 02:30Blockchain analytics firm Nansen reports that nearly half of the top wallets receiving zkSync’s new ZK token have completely sold their allocations, contributing to a 34.5% drop in ZK’s price since its release.
The analysis focused on the “top 10,000 addresses” that received the ZK airdrop, representing only 1.4% of the total eligible wallets. Among these top addresses, 41% sold all their tokens, while 29.2% sold at least a portion, resulting in over 486 million ZK tokens sold across both groups. Conversely, just over 30% of the top wallets retained their ZK tokens.
Overall, zkSync had 695,232 wallets eligible for the airdrop of 3.7 billion ZK tokens, with the Nansen data focusing on the top 10,000. The zkSync Association, a nonprofit created by developers Matter Labs, noted that 45% of tokens were claimed within two hours on June 17, causing initial network issues. As of the latest update, over 491,000 wallets have claimed nearly 75% of the airdropped ZK tokens, according to Matter Labs data scientist Landon Gingerich.
ZK’s value dropped 34.5% within a day, peaking at $0.32 shortly after launch but falling to approximately $0.20, according to CoinGecko. With a total supply of 21 billion tokens, the fully diluted value exceeds $4.4 billion, but only 17.5% of the supply is currently in the market, giving it a market capitalization of around $772 million, down from over $1.1 billion at its peak.
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The significant sell-off by top wallets follows criticism of zkSync’s airdrop criteria. Critics argued that the criteria were too lenient regarding anti-Sybil measures, designed to prevent entities from using multiple wallets to exploit airdrops. On June 15, the project defended its approach, stating that aggressive Sybil filtering could have wrongly flagged genuine users, so it opted for a “unique airdrop design” intended to reward a large number of organic users.
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