ZKsync (ZK)

ZKsync (ZK) is the governance token of ZKsync, a family of networks built by the software company Matter Labs to make Ethereum transactions cheaper and faster. Holders use ZK to vote on protocol upgrades, on how the community treasury is spent and on the rules that bind the chains in the network. The token was released in June 2024 through one of the largest airdrops in crypto history.

ZK is the token, not the network. ZKsync Era, the main chain, is a ZK-rollup: it settles to Ethereum, and its users pay fees in ETH, not ZK. Other chains built with Matter Labs' open-source ZK Stack connect to Era and to each other in what the project calls the Elastic Network (earlier named Hyperchains, then the Elastic Chain). Rival scaling networks include Arbitrum and Optimism, which use a different, optimistic design.

Think of Ethereum as a busy court where every case is heard in full, which is slow and expensive. ZKsync works like a trusted clerk's office next door. It handles thousands of small matters, then sends the court a single sealed certificate proving every one was handled correctly. The court checks the certificate in seconds instead of rehearing each case, so everyone pays a fraction of the cost.

The ZK token does not pay for that work. It is closer to a membership card that gives a vote in how the clerk's office is run: which rules change, which projects get grants and who sits on the committees that can act in an emergency. Proposals made since late 2025 would also tie the token more directly to the network's income.

Matter Labs, co-founded by Alex Gluchowski, launched its first network, now called ZKsync Lite, in 2020 for simple payments. ZKsync Era, which can run Ethereum-style smart contracts, opened to the public in March 2023. It relies on zero-knowledge proofs, short pieces of cryptography that let Ethereum confirm a large batch of transactions without re-executing them.

The ZK token went live on 17 June 2024. About 17.5 percent of the supply was airdropped to roughly 695,000 wallets, based on past activity on the network. The drop drew heavy criticism: users said filters against Sybil farmers, people who run thousands of wallets to collect extra tokens, were too weak, while some long-time users received little or nothing. The token fell sharply in the weeks after launch.

ZK has a total supply of 21 billion tokens, all created at launch. Apart from the airdrop, large shares went to the ecosystem, to investors and to Matter Labs staff, with the insider portions locked and released gradually through scheduled token unlocks. The size of any one allocation follows from its share of the fixed supply:

• $\text{Share}$ is the allocation's percentage of all tokens, written as a decimal.
• $\text{Total supply}$ is the fixed number of ZK, 21 billion.
• $\text{Allocation}$ is the number of tokens in that slice.

For the June 2024 airdrop, $0.175 \times 21{,}000{,}000{,}000 = 3{,}675{,}000{,}000$, or about 3.68 billion ZK. Because the total is fixed and much of it was still locked at launch, the number of tokens in circulation has grown over time even though the supply itself has not. See tokenomics for how such schedules shape a token's market.

ZKsync's governance system, known as ZK Nation, gives ZK holders, or the delegates they choose, votes over protocol upgrades and token spending. A Security Council can act quickly if a critical bug appears, and a group of Guardians can veto proposals they judge harmful. Spending requests move through "Token Program Proposals", which in 2025 and 2026 funded bug bounties, audits and Matter Labs' development work. It is one of the more elaborate examples of DAO-style governance, though large holders and delegates carry most of the voting weight.

In November 2025 Gluchowski published a proposal to move ZK beyond pure governance. Revenue from interoperability fees and enterprise licences would flow into a governance-controlled mechanism for buying back and burning ZK, paying staking rewards and funding the ecosystem. The first part left fee levels and schedules to later proposals and votes.

• The airdrop. The 2024 distribution is still cited as an example of how Sybil farming can dilute rewards meant for real users.
• The April 2025 breach. An attacker who obtained the private key of an admin account controlling the airdrop contracts minted about 111 million unclaimed ZK, worth around 5 million dollars, and sold part of it. The token contract and the network were not affected, and the attacker returned most of the funds within days in exchange for a bounty. The account had been a single-signer wallet rather than a multi-sig wallet, which drew criticism.
• Value capture. For most of its life ZK had no claim on network fees, so its price depended on governance demand and expectations of future changes.
• Competition and dilution. Other layer-2 networks compete for the same users, and continuing unlocks add tokens to the market.

• ZKsync
• ZK Nation governance documentation
• Matter Labs