A couple of weeks ago, we discussed how Linea aimed to boost its dominance in the ZK rollup arena with its Linea Surge campaign. Initially, the strategy seemed effective, but the excitement was short-lived. Linea has now fallen behind ZKsync Era in terms of transactions and active addresses, following a spike in activity at the end of May.

However, ZKsync Era has also faced challenges, experiencing a decline in activity and users since March, although the drop has been less steep compared to Linea's recent plunge.

Last week, ZKsync Era announced an airdrop, distributing 3.6 billion tokens to over 695,000 addresses that had met the interaction criteria with ZKsync Era or its predecessor, ZKsync Lite. This airdrop, marking the first anniversary of ZKsync Era's launch, caused a lot of speculation within the community and may have contributed to the earlier decline in activity.

ZKsync Era, which launched in March 2023 as the first zkEVM on the mainnet, had hinted at a future token to decentralize its sequencer, leading to significant airdrop farming. The official confirmation of the snapshot taken on March 24, 2024, has slightly boosted metrics, with active addresses and transactions seeing a small increase post-announcement.

Despite this, ZKsync Era remains the leading ZK rollup network, though it still lags behind optimistic rollups like Arbitrum One and Base in terms of activity and user count.

If ZKsync cannot reverse its declining metrics, it could pave the way for a new ZK rollup to take the lead.