ZKsync airdropZK

What qualified participants did

1. Used ZKsync Era or ZKsync Lite before the activity snapshot taken on 24 March 2024 (00:00 UTC) and earned at least one activity point.
2. Contributors outside the usage-based path (developers, educators, audit researchers, ecosystem projects) were selected by the team based on their contribution, not on transaction counts.
3. Opened the official claim portal at claim.zknation.io after claiming began on 17 June 2024; claiming was gas-free through account abstraction.
4. GitHub contributors and discussion helpers had to link their address to their GitHub account before 25 June 2024 to be included.
5. Claimed before 3 January 2025 (11:59 PM CEST), because the airdrop tokens cannot be claimed after that date.

Where things stand

The ZKsync airdrop is over. General claiming opened on 17 June 2024 and the window closed on 3 January 2025. According to the official claim FAQ, it is no longer possible to claim after the window closes, and the portal at claim.zknation.io now redirects to that FAQ instead of a live claim page.

Tokens that were never claimed were not minted in the first place. The FAQ explains that they were added to the total mintable supply controlled by the Token Assembly, and that governance could distribute them later through the Token Governor. In other words, a missed claim does not become a personal entitlement later; any future use of those tokens is a governance decision.

We found no official announcement of a second usage-based airdrop. Governance forum material from 2025 and 2026 describes grant and community programs funded in ZK, which are separate from the original retroactive drop. Treat any page that offers a new ZKsync airdrop as unconfirmed until it appears on zknation.io or the official ZKsync channels.

How eligibility worked

The distribution had two paths. Users, who received 89% of the airdrop, were addresses that had transacted on ZKsync Era or ZKsync Lite and met an activity threshold at a snapshot taken on 24 March 2024 at 00:00 UTC. Contributors, who received 11%, were people and projects that had contributed through development, advocacy, or education, regardless of their onchain activity. The ZK Nation post states that each address needed at least one activity point to qualify on the usage path.

Allocations were scaled by the value of activity rather than by the raw number of transactions. The airdrop reached 695,232 wallets in total and had a per-address cap of 100,000 ZK. Allocations below 450 ZK were recycled, which the post says lifted the minimum allocation to 917 ZK. Part of the contributor share, stated as 5.8% of supply, was directed to the treasuries of ZKsync-native projects, with the remainder going to groups such as Ethereum client developers, GitHub contributors, educators, audit contest researchers and community members.

Sybil filtering was deliberately light-touch. The team describes a human-first approach that avoids strict Sybil rules, because such rules can exclude real users. Value-scaled allocations kept most Sybil allocations small, and a final detection step used conservative heuristics to remove the most obvious swarms. The post openly says that some sophisticated bots may still have qualified.

• Snapshot: 24 March 2024, 00:00 UTC.
• Usage-based cap: 100,000 ZK per address.
• GitHub-linked contributors had to link their address by 25 June 2024.
• The airdrop tokens carried no vesting or lockup.

Security notes and the unclaimed-token incident

The official claim site was claim.zknation.io, and claiming was designed to be gas-free through ZKsync native account abstraction. A site that asked for an upfront fee, a seed phrase, or a private key was not the real portal. No legitimate airdrop requires your seed phrase at any point.

A separate episode shows that risk can sit on the project side too. In April 2025 the ZK Nation forum announced that a compromised admin account for three airdrop distribution contracts had called a sweep function and minted about 111 million unclaimed ZK, roughly 0.45% of total supply. ZKsync stated that the protocol and the ZK token contract were not affected. Transaction filtering was applied to the attacker addresses, the Security Council offered a bounty for returning most of the funds, and on 25 April 2025 the team reported that the funds had been returned and the case closed. The recovered assets are held by the Security Council, and governance decides their use.

What to take from this drop

The ZKsync drop rewarded breadth of historical activity at a single snapshot, with a floor that gave small users a meaningful amount and a cap that limited large wallets. Participants who qualified had mostly used the network months before any token was announced. That is a pattern worth noting for future retroactive drops in general, though it is not a promise that any project will behave the same way.

The hard deadline matters too. Claim windows are real, and unclaimed allocations were not held for late claimants. Anyone tracking a future drop should note the official deadline from the project own announcement, not from third-party summaries.

Finally, check where information comes from. The most reliable references for this project are the ZK Nation blog and documentation. Sites that advertise a "new ZKsync airdrop" without linking to those pages should be treated with caution.