In a surprising turn of events, nearly half of the top wallets that received the new zkSync (ZK) token on June 17 have already sold their entire airdrop allocation. This massive sell-off has led to a 34.5% drop in the price of ZK since its launch.
According to blockchain analytics firm Nansen, about 41% of the tracked wallets sold their entire ZK airdrop, while 29.2% sold at least a portion of their tokens. Together, these sales accounted for over 486 million ZK tokens being sold.
Meanwhile, just over 30% of the top receiving wallets have chosen to hold onto their ZK tokens. Nansen’s data focused on the “top 10,000 addresses” from the airdrop, which represents only 1.4% of the 695,232 wallets eligible for the 3.7 billion ZK token distribution.
The zkSync Association, formed by zkSync developers Matter Labs, announced on social media that 45% of the tokens were claimed within two hours of the airdrop, causing some initial network issues. As of now, more than 491,000 wallets have claimed nearly 75% of the airdropped ZK tokens.
The ZK token, which initially hit a high of $0.32, has since plummeted to around $0.20, according to CoinGecko. Despite having a total supply of 21 billion tokens and a fully diluted market value of over $4.4 billion, only 17.5% of the tokens are currently circulating, resulting in a market capitalization of approximately $772 million—down from a peak of over $1.1 billion.
This significant sell-off by top wallets follows criticism of zkSync’s airdrop criteria. Some critics argued that the anti-Sybil measures, intended to prevent multiple wallets from gaming the airdrop, were too lenient. In response, zkSync updated its policy on June 15, explaining that aggressive Sybil filtering could have mistakenly excluded legitimate users. The project opted for a unique airdrop design to reward the most organic users.
This dramatic market movement underscores the volatility and unpredictability of cryptocurrency airdrops, as well as the challenges of designing fair distribution mechanisms.