ZKsync Era's airdrop fails to halt decline in transactions and active addresses

A couple of weeks ago, we discussed how Linea was attempting to grow its dominance in the ZK rollup space with its Linea Surge campaign, which at the time seemed to be working. 

However, the hype seemed short-lived, as Linea has fallen back below ZKsync Era in terms of transactions and active addresses after a bump at the end of May. But it has not been all rosy for ZKsync Era, either. The network has faced a decline in activity and users since March, albeit a slower drop-off than the plunge Linea recently took.

ZKSync Era  confirmed its airdrop last week, with 3.6 billion tokens distributed to over 695,000 addresses that had met the criteria for interacting with ZKsync Era or its non-EVM compatible predecessor, ZKsync Lite.

When ZKsync Era launched in March 2023, it was the first zkEVM to hit the mainnet. While there were no concrete plans for a token, the CEO of Matter Labs, the network's developer, did say a token would be necessary down the line to decentralize the sequencer.

Naturally, this led to a lot of airdrop farming on the platform, and the actual announcement of an airdrop can oftentimes dent metrics after users know about a snapshot date that confirms their allocation.

ZKsync did clarify that the snapshot for airdrop inclusion was taken on March 24, 2024, the first anniversary of ZKsync Era. While this news seems to have been officially verified by the announcement this past week, there was a lot of speculation about the snapshot  already being taken with the ZKsync community, which could have led to the drop-off starting before anything was officially disclosed.

The 7-day moving average of active addresses fell from over 455,000 at the end of February to just 218,000 on June 10. Similarly, the 7-day moving average of transactions has dropped from 1.75 million on February 29 to 512,000 on June 10. The airdrop was confirmed on June 11, and both metrics have actually gotten a small bump since.

The airdrop is a one-time distribution, unlike other protocols that do multiple installments. However, the claim period starts this week, so users who were eligible could return to the network to be ready to receive their tokens.

Despite the downturn, ZKsync Era is still the most popular ZK rollup network. That being said, its activity and user count pale in comparison to Arbitrum One and Base, the most prominent optimistic rollups. 

But if ZKsync is unable to reverse its falling metrics, it could allow a new ZK rollup to come out on top.

This is an excerpt from  The Block's Data & Insights newsletter . Dig into the numbers making up the industry’s most thought-provoking trends.