Matter Labs Has No Plans for zkSync Era Airdrop, But Crypto Twitter Is Speculating

Matter Labs hasn't announced plans for any token airdrop after disclosing Friday that its zkEVM, zkSync Era, is open to the public.

In a statement provided to CoinDesk, Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski said "there are no plans to launch a token for now."

"The team is focused on today's launch and further development of the protocol," Gluchowski said. "A token only comes into play with decentralizing the network, and that is still far on the horizon." Similar comments were reported earlier by The Block.

But there was no stopping Crypto Twitter from filling up with speculation that a token might eventually be forthcoming – and encouraging potential users to start racking up transactions on the freshly launched zkSync Era network to qualify for any rewards.

Read more: Matter Labs Opens zkSync Era to Users, Claiming First in ‘Zero Knowledge’ Tech on Ethereum

Twitter also was filled with unconfirmed solicitations related to a possible zkSync airdrop that appeared to have no connection to the project team.

The issue with speculating that a token may be involved is that there’s a degree of risk. No one knows if an airdrop will ever come, much less the inherent value of what a token on zkSync would represent; plus, there’s all sorts of bogus offers, and scammers frequently use airdrops to rip people off.

That said, Crypto Twitter traders have started to share their strategies for getting in early on potential zkSync airdrop so that they can rack in the possibility of a profit. Suggested options ranged from placing trades on applications on the network to minting a non-fungible token.

Based on the precedent set by many crypto projects, the speculation isn’t totally unfounded.

Arbitrum, a layer 2 scaling tool for the Ethereum blockchain, which has its own "optimistic rollup," came out with its own long-awaited ARB token and released it to community members earlier this week. Crypto traders rushed to cash in on ARB, and during the initial drop, the token soared as high as $14 before falling to $1.38 once more users claimed their tokens.

More to the point, traders had been using the network for months to rack up transactions – having anticipated correctly that such metrics would eventually be used to determine who got the airdropped tokens.

Read more: Arbitrum to Airdrop New Token and Transition to DAO

UPDATE (21:20 UTC): Adds statement to CoinDesk from Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski.