A few weeks ago we discussed how Linea attempted to increase its dominance in the ZK rollup space with the Linea Surge campaign, which seemed to work at the time.
However, the hype seemed short-lived, as Linea surged in late May and then fell below ZKsync times in terms of transactions and active addresses. But even in the ZKsync era, not everything was rosy. The network has been facing a decline in activity and users since March, although the decline is slower than Linea’s recent plunge.
ZKSync Era saw an airdrop last week with 3.6 billion tokens distributed to over 695,000 addresses that met the criteria for interaction with ZKsync Era or its predecessor, ZKsync Lite, which is not compatible with EVM.
When ZKsync Era launched in March 2023, it was the first zkEVM released on mainnet. There were no specific plans for the token, but the CEO of network developer Matter Labs said tokens would be needed to decentralize the sequencer.
Naturally, this has led to a lot of airdrop farming on the platform, and once the airdrop is actually announced, the metrics may be hurt once users know the snapshot date confirming their allocation.
ZKsync clarified that the snapshot for airdrop inclusion was taken on March 24, 2024, the first anniversary of the ZKsync era. While this news appears to have been officially confirmed with an announcement last week, there has been a lot of speculation in the ZKsync community about snapshots already being taken, which could lead to them being launched before they are officially revealed.
The seven-day rolling average of active addresses decreased from more than 455,000 at the end of February to 218,000 on June 10. Likewise, the 7-day moving average of transactions decreased from 1.75 million on February 29 to 512,000 on June 10. The airdrop was confirmed on June 11th, and both metrics have actually seen a slight increase since then.
Airdrop is a one-time distribution, unlike other protocols that split it multiple times. However, the billing period begins this week, so eligible users can prepare to return to the network and receive their tokens.
Despite the recession, ZKsync Era remains the most popular ZK rollup network. That said, compared to the most prominent bullish rollups, Arbitrum One and Base, the activity and user numbers are minimal.
However, if ZKsync is unable to reverse the falling indicator, a new ZK rollup could emerge on top.
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