zkSync Airdrop Farming Guide by Shady

PART I - INTRODUCTION AND STRATEGIES The goal of this post: This post is meant to help you accomplish a lot of things that people are speculating will be a criteria for airdrop eligibility on zkSync. These speculations are mostly based on statements made by the zkSync team or the criteria of other airdrops. I am hoping to provide you guys with a way to reach theoretical eligibility in a way that will also make you a user of various protocols on zkSync that may have an airdrop of their own - really just maximising the value you can extract.

Disclaimer: Obviously most of this is founded on speculation. There is nothing written in stone saying that if you do all of this you will get the airdrop. I recommend doing your own research and keeping an eye out for additional things you can do to increase your odds.

What is zkSync and why should you try for the airdrop? zkSync is a layer 2 scaling solution that uses zk-rollup technology which essentially means they save the blockchain from a lot of computations by doing them off-chain while still having the same amount of security as being on-chain. zkSync raised nearly half a billion dollars - there is certainly a lot of money behind this. First, we can look at a few of the more notable airdrops we have had recently:

ENS - We got ENS back in late 2021 and the tokens were given to people based on three criteria:
Criteria 1: The number of days that someone owned at least one ENS name. Criteria 2: The number of days until their last ENS expires.
Criteria 3: If someone had their primary ENS set.

LooksRare and X2Y2 - These two were both in late 2021/early 2022 and based entirely on OpenSea volume.

Optimism - Optimism has done two airdrops as of now and the criteria for different levels of allocation was as follows:

Airdrop 1
Criteria 1: Bridged to Optimism from L1 prior to June 23, 2021 or had more than one day in between their first and last transaction along with using an app. Criteria 2: Made transactions in four different weeks.
Criteria 3: People who voted in at least one onchain proposal or two on Snapshot (an off-chain voting website that DAOs use).
Criteria 4: Signers of Multi-Sigs that have executed at least 10 transactions. The included Multisig wallets were Gnosis Safe v0.1.0-1.3.0, MultiSigWithDailyLimit, MultiSigWalletWithTimeLock.
Criteria 5: Donating on-chain through Gitcoin on ETH.
Criteria 6: Those who bridged from ethereum to an L2 but still made a transaction at least once a month after bridging.

Airdrop 2
Criteria 1: Those who delegated their Optimism tokens for governance.
Criteria 2: Those who spent over 6 dollars in gas on Optimism.

Optimism also filtered based on the following criteria:
1. Addresses that did not have more than 24 hours in between their first transaction and last transaction on Ethereum.
2. Pattern identified sybil farmers that were creating many duplicate addresses.
3. Filtering wallets that were spamming Snapshot Votes. Wallets were picked by the ones who voted on here: https://snapshot.org/#/ens.eth/proposal/QmfLwPbo5UwnyvkXo7emsSMDMFCr8UtJ76n87v9Rf7gEuH
4. Wallets that were inactive for over two years.1Aptos - Aptos was given to those who completed an application for their test nets or those who minted an APTOS:ZERO NFT. They filtered those who had over 20 wallets connected or IP addresses that had over 20 wallets.

Arbitrum - $ARB will be distributed tomorrow to those who met many different criteria and reward those who met many criteria:
Criteria 1: Those who bridged funds to Arbitrum One or Arbitrum Noba.
Criteria 2: Those who conducted transactions during multiple distinct months.
Criteria 3: Those who conducted more than X transactions or interacted with X smart contracts.
Criteria 4: Those who have conducted transactions with more than X amount of value. Criteria 5: Those who have bridged more than X amount to Arbitrum One.
Criteria 6: Those who conducted more than X transactions on Arbitrum Nova.

Uniswap - Uniswap was allocated to those who provided liquidity or even just used Uniswap along with those who redeemed/held a certain NFT created by the Uniswap team.

1INCH - 1INCH had two rounds of airdrops. The first one was based on trade size, trade frequency and how early someone traded. The second round was based on frequency and trade size.

Main Takeaways If we look at all of the airdrops I listed above, we can note some of the more common things that made people eligible. Notably the following groups of people are rewarded:
1. Early users. 2. Consistent users. 3. Users that provided liquidity. 4. Users trading with high volume. 5. Users with lots of transactions. 6. Users who used test nets. 7. Gitcoin donors. 8. Users who bridged funds. 9. Multisig signers. I will be taking these into consideration when making this guide. __Farming (What you need to do)** Follow the instructions below and hopefully all of the criteria should at least be touched a little bit. We are first going to farm zkSync Era Testnet as there really isn’t much on the mainnet at the moment (though I will include some stuff).

1. PART II: FARMING THE TESTNET__
   Phase I: Getting Goerli ETH from faucets
   Feel free to skip the straight to phase II if you want to by just buying Goerli ETH here: https://testnetbridge.com/ For 0.005 ETH you can buy more than enough for what we are doing. However, I do recommend still using the faucets just because you can do it all in the time it takes for your Goerli ETH to hit your wallet and gives your wallet more activity on Goerli (even though this may not even do anything).
   

1. Get yourself some Goerli ETH from the Alchemy faucet here: https://goerlifaucet.com/.

You will need to sign in with your alchemy account which takes two minutes to make as long as you sign in with your google account (https://www.alchemy.com/).

2. Add the zkSync Era Testnet to your Metamask by going to https://chainlist.org/chain/280 and clicking “Add to Metamask”. You can then select the network in your MetaMask.

3. Go register your ENS on goerli here: https://alpha.ens.domains/. Select any amount of time (I did two years) and then after it is done if you refresh you should see an option to claim .25 goerli ETH as shown below:

4. Go to https://www.allthatnode.com/faucet/ethereum.dsrv and select Goerli Testnet. Input your wallet address and then after completing the captcha you should be sent 0.025 goETH.

5. Visit https://faucet.quicknode.com/drip and follow instructions provided. If you want to, you can post a tweet and claim 0.25 goETH. Otherwise, claim your 0.05 goETH.

PHASE II: Farming different testnet protocols

6. Go to https://goerli.portal.zksync.io/bridge, connect your wallet and then bridge the half of your goETH over to the zkSync Test Net. Bridge the other half of your goETH on https://rinkeby.orbiter.finance/?source=G%C3%B6rli&dest=zkSync%20Era%28G%29. This will take around 5 minutes to process.

7. The first protocol we will be farming: SpaceFi SpaceFi is a cross-chain web3 platform on Evmos and zkSync, with a DEX and they have an NFT as well(which we will be buying if you bought Goerli ETH). We will be using their DEX and claiming their Tester Badge NFT on the zkSync testnet. They will be having
i. Go to https://swap-zksynctest.spacefi.io/#/swap and swap 0.03 goETH for tSPACE.
ii. Go to https://swap-zksynctest.spacefi.io/#/add/ETH/0x880F03cA84e6Cf0D0871c9818A2981DEBabA22b3 and select the max amount of tSPACE to provide liquidity along with ETH. You will need to approve tSPACE first. Be sure to actually execute the transaction to provide liquidity after it is complete.

iii. Go to https://gleam.io/6ZgAk/spacefi-latest-test-on-zksync and complete the tasks in order to input your wallet address. This should get you whitelisted within a day or two to mint the NFT in the next step.
iv. Come back to this step after your wallet gets whitelisted. Mint the SpaceFi Tester Badge on zkSync here: https://galxe.com/spacefi/campaign/GCsNmUdni5.

BONUS STEP - Only do this step if you purchased goETH to bridge. Go to https://app.spacefi.io/#/mint and click the mint button. You will need to approve it to spend your tSPACE first and then mint in a separate transaction after. Be sure to press the “receive” button that pops up after minting.

After minting, go to https://app.spacefi.io/#/mynft and stake your NFT. Yes - this will be another two transactions.

8. After this you are really doing the same thing on every single site: Making a swap and/or providing liquidity. I will post a link to the dex and then what I swapped and provided as liquidity along with ETH.
i. https://app.mute.io/ (ETH -> MUTE, Provide liquidity for the pair)
ii. https://testnet.nexon.finance/ (You first need to click “Claim Token” at the top right. It will prompt you to tweet but you do not have to. Just click the button and close the window and then supply ETH)
iii. https://syncswap.xyz/ (ETH -> USDC. Wasn’t able to provide liquidity as pools were full) If you really look around, I am sure you can find more places to swap. Just make sure you are being safe and doing your own research!

PART II - FARMING THE MAINNET While there isn’t that much to do on the mainnet, it is definitely still worth doing. This isn’t going to be free like the previous part was but is low risk for a possible high reward.
1. Go to and connect your wallet. Bridge as much ETH as you want but be sure to use the following bridges:
i. ZigZag: https://trade.zigzag.exchange/bridge (note that after inputting the amount, it will take a second to load)
ii. zkSync’s own bridge: https://lite.zksync.io/transaction/deposit
iii. Orbiter Finance: https://www.orbiter.finance/?referer=zksync&dests=zksync&fixed=1&source=Ethereum&dest=zkSync%20Lite
2. Use the only exchange there is on the mainnet at the moment: https://trade.zigzag.exchange/?market=WETH-ETH&network=zksync I personally just swapped ETH for WETH but if you want you can try to make some actual trades. Also just want to make note that instead of using a specific node to execute the transaction, you just use ETH mainnet and sign a gasless transaction.
3. The next thing we are doing on the mainnet is becoming a gitcoin donor. Go to https://bounties.gitcoin.co/grants/explorer and sign in using github. If you don’t have a github account just make one when it prompts you to - should only take a few minutes. 4. Click “Add to cart” on some random grants available and then just give them 10 bucks or something. I am choosing to give back 5% to the Gitcoin match pool as well. When you click “I’m Ready to Checkout”, select zkSync Checkout. It should open up another tab and ask you to complete payment and in my case, I had to sign again to confirm my contributions as something went wrong.

5. We will also mint an NFT on the mainnet. You first need to go to https://app.pinata.cloud/register and make an account. You can then click Add Files -> File -> Select an image to upload. When it is done uploading, copy the CID.

6. Go to https://lite.zksync.io/transaction/nft/mint/ and paste the CID and press “Authorize to Mint NFT”. This once again will take a signature and will charge you gas within the zkSync wallet.This was being buggy when I was doing it so make sure you see it confirm.

7. Repeat step 6 and then wait a little while and then withdraw the NFT to L1. You will be able to withdraw it after a zero knowledge proof has been generated for that block and the root hash of the rollup block has been included in the smart contract on Ethereum mainnet.

Conclusion Whats left? Lots. You should be trying to keep up with updates regarding zkSync and also be sure to send at least a couple transactions __every week on both the mainnet (on zigzag) and on the Test Net (any/all of the DEXs used). Also, it wouldn’t hurt to complete some of the quests on crew3 (https://crew3.xyz/c/zksync/invite/hg3MGCBKWxrC9dHUaXiiW).75