On June 17, East 8 Time, zkSync launched its token ZK for the first time nearly a year after the mainnet went live, but the airdrop rules and distribution plan sparked a huge uproar in the community. What was anticipated as a long-awaited "moment of technical leadership" quickly turned into a comprehensive questioning of token design, governance structure, and community relations. This turmoil not only changed the market's short-term expectations for zkSync but also forced the team to continuously revise their statements and roadmap in a very short time, exposing a deeper governance and identity crisis beyond the technical narrative.

The Spark of Airdrop Design and "Ecological Distribution"

On June 11, East 8 Time, zkSync announced the ZK token economic model and airdrop rules, with a total supply of 21 billion ZK, of which 17.5% (3.675 billion) is allocated for airdrops, 29.3% (approximately 6.15 billion) belongs to investors, 19.9% (approximately 4.2 billion) is distributed to the team and core contributors, and the remaining portion is allocated to "ecological funds" and other long-term uses. On the surface, this design continues the mainstream L2's "community + ecology + institutions" three-part structure, but the specific execution details quickly ignited dissatisfaction.

In the airdrop portion, zkSync adopted a points model centered on chain interactions, activity, and early participation, emphasizing "real users rather than empty accounts." However, on-chain data indicated that many small and medium users, despite having completed multiple interactions on zkSync for a long time, only received hundreds to thousands of ZK, while some high-frequency arbitrageurs, bridging bots, and short-term volume accounts received significantly higher amounts. More controversially, the billions of tokens categorized as "ecological use" lacked clear and transparent governance arrangements, with the initial announcement merely glossing over it with the justification of "used for future ecological incentives, strategic cooperation, research and development," without providing specific lock-up curves, decision-making mechanisms, or oversight methods.

This combination led to two overlapping emotions: on one hand, a relative sense of deprivation that "real users are undervalued while speculators are rewarded," and on the other hand, a concentrated questioning of the nearly half of the token share held by investors and the team. In multiple comparisons, many users directly compared zkSync's airdrop and unlocking plans with those of Arbitrum, Optimism, Starknet, believing that zkSync lagged significantly behind similar projects in community distribution ratios, detailed explanations, and governance transparency, thus laying the groundwork for a subsequent trust crisis.

Community Backlash and the Chain Reaction of Reputation Collapse

Within days of the airdrop details being announced, negative public opinion regarding zkSync rapidly accumulated on Twitter and various communities. The most prominent criticisms focused on three directions: first, overall dissatisfaction with the 17.5% airdrop ratio being too low, which contrasted with the long-cultivated "community first" narrative on social media; second, strong distrust regarding the "points weight, threshold setting" in the airdrop algorithm, with many users posting on-chain transaction records to prove they were early real users of zkSync, yet were algorithmically categorized into low allocation; third, institutional concerns about the vague terms of "ecological distribution" and "foundation reserves," questioning whether zkSync was using technical discourse to mask its actual high centralization.

As discussions fermented, some opinion leaders began to escalate from specific complaints of "unfair airdrop" to systematic criticism of zkSync's governance philosophy. They pointed out that the project team repeatedly emphasized "open ecology" and "decentralized future" during the fundraising process, but in actual distribution, nearly half of the chips were firmly held by the foundation, team, and investors, leaving the community as a passive "governed object." This narrative gap not only damaged short-term reputation but also prompted external parties to reassess zkSync's position in the L2 track: is it merely a technically impressive engineering project, or is it a truly intent on sharing network value with users as a public infrastructure?

In this process, some developers and ecological project parties also showed clear signs of wavering. Teams that originally planned to issue tokens or deploy long-term on zkSync began to openly discuss multi-chain deployment or even migration alternatives; meanwhile, the sentiment among ordinary users of "airdrop and leave" further amplified doubts about zkSync's long-term stickiness. The rapid collapse of reputation and short-term liquidity flight turned this airdrop from a node that should have solidified community foundations into a negative event that backfired on brand identity.

Team's Response and Attempts to Repair the Narrative

In the face of the overwhelming backlash, the zkSync team and foundation made intensive statements in the following days, attempting to repair the narrative from three levels: technology, governance, and roadmap. They first emphasized that the initial design goal of the ZK token was to provide governance tools and security incentives for the network, not a short-term speculative vehicle; under this logic, allocating a larger proportion of tokens to the development team and long-term ecological funds was explained as compensation for years of research and development investment and a reserve for future multi-round upgrades. The team specifically mentioned that the current ZK-Rollup technology still has many unresolved challenges in terms of performance, security, and data availability, and continuous research and development require stable funding and human support, which should not be completely overshadowed by "airdrop sentiment."

Subsequently, the team began to make limited corrections and clarifications to some airdrop details, including more detailed disclosures of lock-up and unlocking rhythms, promising that important ecological funds would be subject to broader multi-signature and community oversight, and hinting that future imbalances in early distribution might be compensated through secondary airdrops or community proposals. However, these actions appeared somewhat delayed in both timing and intensity. What the market had already captured was the structural arrangement in the initial version that favored internal stakeholders, and the subsequent "tweaks" and "explanations" seemed to many users more like a passive concession under public pressure rather than an active choice to build a healthy governance structure.

A deeper issue is that zkSync has long positioned itself as a "technical leader," with technical discourse dominating daily communication; however, this crisis exposed the clumsiness and sluggishness of a highly technical team when facing complex community emotions and collective psychology. The team attempted to explain the distribution logic using security models, long-term R&D costs, and Rollup economics, but overlooked the strong demand from the crypto community for "being respected and seen": users need not only a fair formula but also symbolic signals of being treated equally. Once points are lost in this dimension, relying solely on technical details and lock-up curves for explanation makes it difficult to truly mend the rift.

zkSync's Displacement in the L2 Competitive Landscape

From a broader perspective, zkSync's airdrop turmoil occurred at a time when Ethereum L2 competition had entered a relatively mature and differentiated stage. Arbitrum has built a solid moat with its massive DeFi scale and DAO governance practices; Optimism has created a "super-chain" alliance around OP Stack by allying with leading players like Coinbase and Base; while ZK projects like Starknet are steadily advancing the industrialization of the STARK technology route. In this landscape, zkSync's biggest card was its early launch, forward-looking layout on account abstraction and payment experience, and the technical narrative surrounding zkEVM.

However, when the airdrop event triggered a community trust overdraft, these technical advantages were significantly compressed in user perception. For many ordinary users, the technical differences between L2s do not constitute a decisive factor in daily decision-making, and the cost of migrating funds between different L2s is becoming increasingly low. Once trust in a chain's governance structure and distribution philosophy is lost, migrating to alternatives with "more open governance and friendlier distribution" faces almost no resistance. In other words, in a highly substitutable track, governance and community relations themselves are part of product competitiveness, not merely an ancillary "public relations issue."

Moreover, with the rise of re-staking protocols like EigenLayer and the gradual formation of a "modular Ethereum" architecture with multiple Rollups coexisting, the technical performance advantage of a single L2 is becoming harder to translate into exclusive network effects. The market will pay more attention to whether this chain can maintain security under multi-party governance, whether it can stably output developer incentives in the long term, and whether it respects community consensus at key governance nodes. The airdrop controversy for zkSync equates to a self-reduction on these key indicators, and this self-weakening may ferment in future competition.

Of course, from the perspective of the technology cycle, zkSync is still in the early stages of ZK technology commercialization. It still has room to release new narratives and application scenarios in terms of proof system optimization, transaction throughput, and cost compression. If the team can deliver convincing performance and user experience results in subsequent version iterations while continuously making substantial concessions on on-chain governance, foundation transparency, and ecological distribution mechanisms, then the current trust damage may not be irreversible. Conversely, if this crisis is simply viewed as a temporary fluctuation of "excessive emotion" without triggering deep governance reform, zkSync is likely to gradually retreat from "protagonist" to "technology supplier" in the coming years, yielding to competitors that better understand how to balance the relationships among capital, technology, and community.

Can zkSync Rebuild Its Contractual Relationship with the Community?

Returning to the question itself, whether the zkSync team still has the opportunity to restore its reputation hinges on how it understands the essence of this crisis. If the airdrop controversy is merely seen as a technical error in distribution ratios, the solution will naturally lean towards compensating the overlooked user groups through secondary airdrops, subsidy activities, or ecological incentives. Such operations may help to smooth short-term emotions but fail to address the deeper trust gap: does the community believe it has real say in the long-term value creation of this chain, and is it confident that the team will not prioritize capital and internal interests over public interests in key decisions?

To rebuild the contract at this level, zkSync needs to take steps beyond mere "repair" and demonstrate the courage to restructure governance and narrative. For example, more vigorously incorporating ecological funds and reserve tokens into public, verifiable on-chain governance processes; introducing mandatory community voting thresholds for key parameter adjustments rather than symbolically soliciting opinions; providing traceable, contestable, and rectifiable mechanisms for the unlocking and use of investor and team shares. The costs of these measures may not be low in the short term, but in the long run, they are the necessary price to transform zkSync from a high-performance technical project into a network with public infrastructure attributes.

Equally important is that the team needs to shift its communication style from "engineer monologue" to "multi-party participatory dialogue." Technical details remain important, but when it comes to issues of public resource distribution and governance evolution, how to explain the value trade-offs behind decisions, how to respond to the reasonable anxieties of different groups, and how to candidly acknowledge mistakes and provide clear improvement paths are essential soft communication skills that will determine whether zkSync can survive in the fierce L2 competition. As long as the team is willing to make actual changes in these areas, the current crisis may still be viewed in hindsight as a painful but necessary "governance upgrade starting point"; conversely, it will become the starting point for the community to label zkSync as "strong in technology, weak in governance."

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