Early adopters can now declare 8% of the token’s provide, with 30% earmarked to offer ongoing buying and selling incentives.
Zeta Markets, a Solana-based decentralized perpetuals alternate, is the newest web3 undertaking to airdrop a token to early adopters.
On June 27, Zeta opened airdrop claims for its ZEX token. ZEX facilitates governance and staking for the undertaking, and also will function the native gasoline token for Zeta’s upcoming Layer 2 community, Zeta X.
“ZEX is the native token of Zeta Markets, powering governance, staking, and incentives on the protocol,” Zeta stated. “Additionally, ZEX will serve as both the native gas token and an incentive mechanism on Zeta X, Zeta’s pioneering DeFi L2 on Solana.”
Zeta is at the moment the Twenty fifth-largest DeFi protocol on Solana with a complete worth locked of $17.2 million, in line with DeFi Llama. The platform drove $45 million in 24-hour quantity, has processed $10 billion in cumulative quantity since launching in 2021, and hosts 125,000 month-to-month energetic customers.
For comparability, dYdX v4, a high DeFi derivatives alternate, hosted $542 million price of trades over the previous 24 hours, in line with CoinMarketCap.
Zeta allotted 10% of ZEX’s provide to the airdrop. Lively Zeta merchants can now declare 70% of the drop, with allocations decided by an inside snapshot taken on June 7.
Zeta ecosystem companions will obtain 1% of ZEX’s provide, whereas the remaining tokens are going to ZEX stakers in a follow-up drop that may happen after 28 days. Airdrop claims will stay open till Sept. 25, 2024.
“The initial airdrop is designed to reward genuine and long-term users of Zeta,” the undertaking stated.
Zeta added that 30% of ZEX’s complete provide is earmarked to offering ongoing buying and selling incentives, with rewards distributed to customers over 90 epochs lasting 28 days every.
Vote-escrow tokenomics
Zeta claims its token is among the many first to introduce a “vote-escrow” (VE) mechanism to the Solana ecosystem.
VE stakers obtain governance energy proportional to the sum of staked property and the time period that tokens are locked for, permitting stakers to vote on which asset swimming pools rewards are allotted to. This mechanism famously gave rise to the “Curve Wars” in 2021, the place DeFi protocols competed to allocate CRV to Curve’s liquidity swimming pools.
Zeta described VE-tokenomics as “incentivizing long-term commitment with exponentially greater governance and boosted incentives for stakers.”
Zeta X to affix Solana’s L2 ecosystem
The airdrop follows Zeta asserting plans to launch a Solana-based Layer 2 appchain, Zeta X (ZX) on Might 23.
Zeta X will comprise a Solana-based optimistic rollup that makes use of zero-knowledge proofs to facilitate permissionless on-chain settlement. The platform will match orders on Layer 2 whereas utilizing Solana’s base layer for knowledge availability and settlement, aiming to supply on-chain efficiency similar to centralized platforms.
The undertaking claims Zeta X will facilitate throughput of as much as 10,000 transactions per second and transaction affirmation in lower than 10 milliseconds. Zeta X will even assist leverage of as much as 50x.
“By taking the inherent strengths of Solana’s Layer 1 and harnessing the power of a purpose-built L2, ZX will provide traders with an unparalleled experience in terms of speed, efficiency, and security,” stated Tristan Frizza, Founding father of Zeta Markets.
Frizza informed The Defiant that though the undertaking is at the moment targeted on constructing out ZX to assist a revamped Zeta alternate, it’ll invite third-party builders to construct “synergistic applications” on the community sooner or later.
“Our present plans are to concentrate on a single alternate utility to finest prioritize liquidity and consumer expertise,” Frizza stated. “That being said, following that we would definitely be exploring ways for people to compose on top of this liquidity layer and build synergistic applications on our L2, for example, money markets, basis trading vaults, etc.”
Zeta X is expected to launch on mainnet during the first quarter of 2025 following a testnet deployment in Q3 of this year.
Zeta’s Layer 2 ambitions come as Solana’s ecosystem appears to be tentatively moving towards embracing L2, despite the Solana team committing to achieving high-throughput scalability at its base layer.
On June 21, Light Protocol and Helius Labs ignited controversy with the testnet deployment of ZK Compression, a Solana-based scaling solution appearing to borrow much of its architecture from Ethereum Layer 2s.
“It’s like an L2 without all the things that people complain about L2s,” stated Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s co-founder, amid fierce debate on social media. “It’s an L2 that doesn’t need a security council multisig, users don’t need to switch chain IDs, doesn’t need a governance token, doesn’t need an external sequencer, Solana validators still get all the transaction fees.”
