zkSync is airdropping a whopping 17.5% of its supply in the initial airdrop, it has a 21B supply and and 3.675B will be airdropped to 695,232 wallets. With a premarket price of $0.37, its a $1.35B airdrop, biggest in the history of crypto airdrops.

As per blockscout there are 9.74M addresses that interacted with zkSync blockchain in the last about 3 years time but only ~7% of these wallets are eligible for the airdrop. zkSync team had to be very strict with their eligibility criteria to identify the real users and exclude sybils. However, no eligibility criteria could be 100% effective at weeding out all sybils while getting all the real users in. So, some real users would have been excluded due to the strict criteria as well whereas some obvious sybil wallets may have made the cut because they fulfill the criteria.

The eligibility criteria or the airdrop methodology is simple yet complex, I'll not go into all the details here, you can read about it in the official docs.

The main points however are:

  • It was a multi step process, first step was allocating points based on usage
  • Next step was deciding allocation based on bridged amount and TWAB - time weighted average balance.
  • Finally, a few multipliers were applied for various actions for example holding native NFTs, trading native tokens, interaction with popular smart contracts etc.
  • After the 3 steps, the allocation was calculated, if it was below 450 $zk, the wallet was marked ineligible and its tokens went back into the pool.

Does it sound excessively complex? How did we get there? I will tell you a little story from my own experience. I have been active in the airdrop farming since I first got my $UNI airdrop. $UNI was the first ever airdrop that I received. Eligibility criteria was very simple, all you had to do was make 1 transaction on uniswap before the snapshot date and you were in. The snapshot date was 1st Sep, 2020. DeFi was just getting started. Uniswap was vampire attacked by Sushiswap which forked Uniswap and introduced their token which was distributed for staking liquidity on its platform. In response, Uniswap launched their $UNI token and rewarded all the users that interacted with Uniswap before the snapshot date. It was a surprise airdrop that no one expected. No one was farming the airdrop. 0 sybils, 0 bots, 0 farmers.

After the $UNI airdrop, people started speculating on the next airdrop and there started some farming activity where you would intentionally interact with a protocol to receive the airdrop. I remember someone posting on twitter about creating 1000 wallets and doing 1 transaction from each of the wallets on 1inch to qualify for the airdrop. Funnily , all of his 1000 wallets got excluded because all of his transactions were below $20 and the eligibility criteria for $1inch was one transaction worth more than $20. I remember talking to a friend about potential $1inch airdrop before it happened and he immediately made one transaction, I made one transaction as well. After a few days, when the airdrop was announced, he messaged me saying he was eligible for the airdrop, when I checked it, I was not eligible because my transaction was of $19.80 😡

The airdrop farming started catching up. Another popular aggregator Paraswap was hyped up for a potential airdrop. 1.3m wallets interacted with Paraswap but only 20K made the cut. The eligibility criteria was a minimum of 6 transactions before 8 Oct 2021. I got excluded because I just made a couple of transactions 😡. Do you see where this is going?

As more and more people started farming airdrops, the eligibility criteria was evolving with every new airdrop. People got clues from previous airdrops and started applying that new knowledge to the next projects they were farming but it was still early. Optimism airdropped their tokens to all wallets that just made 1 transaction on their network but they had a tiered allocation which went up if you had more transactions. They also did sybil analysis and filtering, so if you were a legit user who used the chain organically, you got the airdrop. After optimism, a lot of farmers moved on to arbitrum probably thinking that arbitrum would use similar criteria to optimism but with each big airdrop, the number of people actively farming the next big airdrop kept on increasing. So the projects need to be creative and bring some new ways to find and reward more organic users of their product rather than someone who is only using their product to get the airdrop. The organic user is likely to stick around whereas the airdrop farmer will move on to the next big airdrop.

Arbitrum evolved the eligibility criteria further, so users had to have made transactions in several different weeks or months, having used different contracts and so on. Another interesting aspect was the value transacted in each transaction and the overall value of all transactions as well as the number of times you bridged and amount transferred. It was a really good criteria to filter out sybils, for example arbitrum was able to filter out a big chunk of farmers that met the criteria but did all the transactions within a 48 hours period. Farmers didn't see that one coming, did they?

So, now the new way to farm the next big airdrop was etched in the minds of the farmers which included pushing several hundreds or thousands of transactions, pushing those transactions in different weeks and months, creating big volume by repeating similar transactions over and over etc. Moreover, a number of industrial airdrop farming operations have sprung up, they create thousands of wallets and push similar repeated transactions from all these wallets. Now, all big projects that are hyped up for an airdrop are dealing with millions of addresses that are competing for the airdrop and the airdrop farmers are in a fierce competition as well. Shall we call it the mainstream adoption of the airdrop farming? 😉

With every big airdrop, the airdrop criteria keeps evolving. People look at the airdrop criteria in retrospect and think "wow, that was so easy to achieve" but still a lot of people don't make the cut. For example, for starknet, all you had to do was trade more than $50 and have a balance of $10 of eth to be eligible. I think of it from the perspective of the project, they are dealing with millions of addresses, obviously they can't reward all of the addresses and they need to make an eligibility criteria that is simple and yet filters out 80-90% of the users. The criteria must as well seem totally achievable, legit and fair. But now, there is an added element of complexity to filter out these 1000s of industrial sybil wallets as well. One very important aspect is to look at the on-chain history of wallets across all the other chains as well. The average crypto user performs a number of actions that form their on chain history. For example, buying valuable NFTs, creating an ENS name, having a decentralised social handle, trading/holding other coins on other chains etc. Sybils can't afford to have such colorful history on each one of their 1000s of wallets.

zkSync did exactly that, they looked at the on-chain history of each wallet along with their activities on the zkSync Era network. While average farmer was pushing transactions with low risk either just wrapping/unwrapping $ETH or trading USDC to USDT and vice versa, the real users were trading the risky tokens and NFTs on the network. While the farmers were bridging same funds in and out of the network, farming other layer-2s at the same time racking up their "fake" bridging volume, the real users bridged once or twice and didn't move the funds out afterwards. So, farmers with thousand of transactions and 100Ks in bridging volume got excluded while real users with a few transactions and smaller bridging volume made the cut. I believe it was a very smart algorithm designed by the zkSync team and it's a commendable effort from them. Such algorithms can't be 100% accurate and that is totally understood.

But zkSync is getting a lot of backlash from the so called "community" of farmers that are angry because they got excluded despite continuously pushing 1000s of transactions, paying several hundred dollars in fees and bridging hundred thousands of volume. Their numbers look very good when viewed from arbitrum algorithm but their on chain foot print doesn't match with their actions on zkSync. I bet some of these have less than $1000 across their multi chain portfolios but their bridging volume is in hundred thousands because they are continuously rotating that money across the bridges to make those numbers. These farmers are demanding the $zk token airdrop as if they were hired to push all those transactions. They feel entitled to the airdrop as if they had signed a binding contract with zkSync. They are threatening to abandon the chain and appealing to tier-1 exchanges to not list $zk. Some are even threatening to sue zkSync or complain to the US SEC 🤣. Read this interesting one from a disgruntled farmer for example 👇

Some are even appealing to Vitalik to do something and calling it a scam 🤣

While these farmers are threatening to leave the zkSync ecosystem, they don't realize zkSync has injected massive liquidity into its chain with $zk and there will be several opportunities here. These farmers will be back on zkSync to farm the next big airdrop ($LENS 😉) once its deployed there. Unfortunately, they may not make the cut again if they farmed it with arbitrum criteria 😈

Finally, I believe the next big airdrop will use a combination of their product use along with the on-chain footprint of the user to decide on the eligibility. May be the next one will use AI to analyze the wallet activity and find out the obvious farmers. AI can go further and make correlation among the wallets based on their activities to filter out large sybil farms as well.

If you are a farmer and trying to farm the next big airdrop, my advice to you is very simple, you don't need to overthink it and try to "guess" the eligibility criteria. Remember the eligibility criteria will be decided later and will evolve. Rather, be a genuine user, think and act like a genuine user, engage like a genuine user, be curious, try out different features of the product, have an on-chain foot print and you should be fine. The project will choose you for your genuine actions and not because you are among the top 1% based on eligibility criteria of another project. And if you still don't make the cut, remember you were not hired to push the buttons and you shouldn't feel entitled. Stop bashing the project and focus on some productive work instead.

Enough of blabbering, back to work now.