Almost fifty percent of the top wallets that got the new zkSync (ZK) coin on Monday have already sold their whole allocation in the airdrop, therefore influencing a 34.5% decline in the price of ZK since its introduction. According to data from blockchain analytics company Nansen, 29.2% of tracked addresses sold at least portion of their tokens while over 41% sold their whole airdrop. Over 486 million ZK was sold overall across both cohorts.

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Mass Sell-Off Contributes to Sharp Decline in ZK Price

According to CoinGecko, the ZK token—which peaked at $0.32 soon after launch—has dropped to about $0.20. This substantial decline corresponds with a major sell-off among most of the top receiving wallets. From around $1.1 billion to roughly $772 million, the market capitalization of the token has also dropped sharply.

Breakdown of Wallet Activity Post-Airdrop

Of the top receiving wallets, only over thirty percent have kept onto their ZK tokens. Though it just covers roughly 1.4% of the 695,232 wallets zkSync said were qualified for its airdrop of 3.7 billion ZK tokens last week, the data covered the “top 10,000 addresses” that received the ZK airdrop.

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Created last week by zkSync developers Matter Labs, the charity zkSync Association wrote to X earlier on June 17 that 45% of the tokens were claimed in within two hours, with the load generating some initial network problems. Data produced by Matter Labs data scientist Landon Gingerich shows over 491,000 wallets claiming almost 75% of the airdropped ZK as of publication.

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zkSync’s Response to Airdrop Criticism and Market Reactions

Following zkSync’s defense against criticism of its airdrop policies, top wallets’ main sell-off comes from Critics felt the anti-Sybil rules were too loose, allowing entities using several wallets to game airdrops to go unpackled. The project revised a June 15 paper claiming aggressive Sybil filtering could have wrongly detected actual users, so it selected a “unique airdrop design” it said aimed to reward the biggest amount of organic users.

Even with the policies, the first sell-off has generated notable market volatility. It will be interesting to see how the value of the token and market confidence will settle as zkSync negotiates this demanding phase.

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