Zeta Markets Airdrops ZEX Token to Early Adopters, Introduces Vote-Escrow Tokenomics to Solana

Zeta Markets, a Solana-based decentralized perpetuals exchange, is the latest web3 project to airdrop a token to early adopters.

Solana-based decentralized perpetuals exchange Zeta Markets has commenced airdrop claims for its native ZEX token.

Active Zeta traders can now claim up to 70% of the airdrop, with allocations determined by an internal snapshot taken on June 7. To claim the airdrop, users must connect their eligible Solana wallet to the Zeta Markets website and follow the on-screen instructions.

The remaining tokens will be allocated to ZEX stakers in a follow-up drop that will take place after 28 days. Airdrop claims will remain open until September 25, 2024.

According to Zeta, the initial airdrop is designed to reward genuine and long-term users of the protocol. The total ZEX supply is 1 billion tokens, and 10% of the supply is allocated to the airdrop.

Zeta Markets is currently the 25th-largest DeFi protocol on Solana with a total value locked (TVL) of $17.2 million, according to DeFi Llama. The platform drove $45 million in 24-hour volume, has processed $10 billion in cumulative volume since launching in 2021, and hosts 125,000 monthly active users.

For comparison, dYdX v4, a top DeFi derivatives exchange, hosted $542 million worth of trades over the past 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.

Zeta claims its token is among the first to introduce a “vote-escrow” (VE) mechanism to the Solana ecosystem.

VE stakers receive governance power proportional to the sum of staked assets and the time duration that tokens are locked for, allowing stakers to vote on which asset pools rewards are allocated to. This mechanism famously gave rise to the “Curve Wars” in 2021, where DeFi protocols competed to allocate CRV to Curve’s liquidity pools.

Zeta described VE-tokenomics as “incentivizing long-term commitment with exponentially greater governance and boosted incentives for stakers.”

Thirty percent of ZEX’s total supply is earmarked to providing ongoing trading incentives, with rewards distributed to users over 90 epochs lasting 28 days each.

The airdrop follows Zeta announcing plans to launch a Solana-based Layer 2 appchain, Zeta X (ZX), on May 23.

Zeta X will comprise a Solana-based optimistic rollup that utilizes zero-knowledge proofs to facilitate permissionless on-chain settlement. The platform will match orders on Layer 2 while using Solana’s base layer for data availability and settlement, aiming to offer on-chain performance comparable to centralized platforms.

The project claims Zeta X will facilitate throughput of up to 10,000 transactions per second and transaction confirmation in less than 10 milliseconds. Zeta X will also support leverage of up to 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,” said Tristan Frizza, Founder of Zeta Markets.

Frizza told The Defiant that although the project is currently focused on building out ZX to support a revamped Zeta exchange, it will invite third-party developers to build “synergistic applications” on the network in the future.

"Our current plans are to focus on a single exchange application to best prioritize liquidity and user experience,” Frizza said. “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.

Solana’s ecosystem has been slow to embrace Layer 2 technologies despite the network's commitment to achieving high-throughput scalability at its base layer. However, recent developments, such as the testnet deployment of ZK Compression, suggest that L2s may finally be gaining traction within the Solana community.

The above is the detailed content of Zeta Markets Airdrops ZEX Token to Early Adopters, Introduces Vote-Escrow Tokenomics to Solana. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!