Passport is now part of human.tech

I. The zkSync Airdrop: Background

About seven days ago, zkSync airdropped over 3.6B ZK tokens to “early users and adopters” of their L2 network. This TGE was highly-anticipated, and naturally, Crypto Twitter and the community at large focused on the buzz leading up to the event. But here at Passport, we’re always looking to improve our methods that distinguish real humans from Sybils and other bad actors, so we’re equally interested in the post-game analysis. 🤓

A bit of context: Gitcoin has been one of zkSync’s longest standing partners. We first integrated ZKSync (Lite) into the checkout flow of our Quadratic Funding Grants rounds in 2020, and that traffic accounted for as much as 75% of new users and nearly 80% of total monthly transactions at our peak. It’s important to note, the Matter Labs team is great, and have always been highly receptive to feedback and calls for improvement. We found adopting zkSync lite to be mutually beneficial as it drove down Tx fees for those donating to Gitcoin Grants by as much as 85%.

Fast forward to June 2024, and zkSync Era has over 6MM wallets, and LOTS of activity, while zkSync Lite has been sunset. Their growth and evolution has been wonderful to see, for both Gitcoin and the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole.

What’s been undeniably troubled, however, is the narrative around the recent airdrop — misaligned expectations from users compounded by lack of clarity around how to earn an allocation.

About six weeks ago, we encountered lots of FUD surrounding the idea of zkSync using Passport to protect their airdrop. This same horde of bots and Sybil actors have assembled to FUD LayerZero, EigenLayer, and of course zkSync.

We’re really appreciative to those who are standing up to the trolls. “Free money” should never be an expectation. Crypto is not an airdrop casino.

In the end, Passport Score was not a qualifying factor for participants the zkSync airdrop, but looking at the data mapped to our Unique Humanity Score yielded interesting results.

II. Allocation of $ZK

Let’s get down to the details: In this post, we will walk you through the outcomes we observed for those who have claimed their $ZK tokens among three populations:

1. Those with a Passport score above 20

2. Those with a Passport score above 0, but less than 20

3. Those without a Passport

At the time of analysis (June 21, 2024), just shy of 600k unique wallets have claimed the airdrop. Of those 600k wallet addresses, nearly 40% have a Passport (that’s pretty great). Even better is that nearly 10% of those who claimed have a Passport score above 20. Passport is often the default for Sybil defense—the scale of our userbase really makes the claim experience low friction, and as you’ll see, improves outcomes.

Comparing behavior across these three segments offers interesting insights.

• The first is that wallets with a Passport score above 20 received more tokens (both average and median) than those with scores below 20.

• In fact, those with a score above 20 received more than double the amount of tokens that those with scores below 20 received.

• Further, those with a Passport received more tokens than those without a Passport. This suggests a high correlation between real humans being rewarded more generously (2.2x) than Sybils / those without a Passport—a huge win for zkSync!

Averages and medians immediately below:

III. Retention of Airdropped $ZK

Next, we looked at what % of new token holders are dumping their $ZK token. Across the entire airdrop, 66% of all wallets reviewed dumped their tokens. The proportion of wallets dumping is significantly higher if they do not have a Passport, as expected. Conversely, those with a Passport score >20 is a smaller dump percentage at 55.2% of wallets compared to 70% of wallets without a Passport score.

Here we have the percentage of wallets with ANY $ZK balance left:

Let’s look at the economic side of this now. If we compare the % of the $ZK allocation these segments still hold in their wallet (as of June 21, 2024), it is significantly different based on their Passport score. To summarize the details below, we found those who have Passport scores above 20 hold nearly 40% of the tokens they claimed, whereas the average of non-Passport holders only are only holding 18%. Said differently, those with a Passport score above 20 are holding 2x+ the tokens than those without a Passport.

We believe this signifies that the Passport holders with scores above 20 are likely longer-term aligned token holders when compared to those without a Passport. Here is how this breaks out:

IV. The Sybil Story

Now, let’s get into the juicy matter of Sybils in this airdrop. Looking at $ZK transfers after the airdrop: 10,993,370 $ZK in total has been transferred to just 10 wallets. Transfer to these 10 wallets have come from different clusters of sizes between 400 and 1400 wallets. You can see the accumulation here:

Passport is not perfect, but we see dramatically less accumulation among those with a score above 20. The largest rings of wallets with Passport scores >20 do not exceed 26 wallets and account for a total 2,962,140 $ZK (3.7x less). This insight also helps us to remove and improve our scoring mechanisms as we now know how these users are earning scores above 20.

V. The Aftermath

Overall, prices of the token are down (all markets are as of this writing), but TVL is up massively as users claim their tokens. Tx volume is up 33% over 7 days ago (as of June 21), which is great to see, but is likely not sustainable. This feels like an okay outcome for zkSync, despite the FUD. We hope this means the mob will move on, and they can get back to building a great zkNation with real humans.

Bottom line: if you want to structure airdrops, rewards, or incentivized actions to real humans—use Passport. We’re simple to integrate and bring better outcomes for you and for your ecosystem. We offer bespoke analysis, onchain mechanisms that verify unique humanity, and the industry leading Unique Humanity Scoring to improve outcomes for all EVM compatible ecosystems.