Zora's Chaotic Airdrop Causes 64% Market Cap Drop

The web3 social network Zora launched its airdrop program for the ZORA token in an unannounced and chaotic manner, causing significant disruptions. The airdrop went live shortly before 2pm without any prior notice, despite the company's last pre-launch communication being an X post from two days prior, which simply stated that the token would be live on April 23, 2025. Zora finally made an official announcement two hours after the launch, but its first tweet was quickly deleted, and the current one was uploaded shortly after.

The launch of the airdrop coincided with the crash of the block explorer BaseScan, which users noticed had stopped creating blocks on the Base blockchain for at least 15 minutes. Blockscout, another community blockchain explorer, also experienced issues or delays. The Base network itself remained unaffected and continued to operate normally.

The chaotic launch resulted in a significant drop in ZORA’s market cap, falling 64% from a high of $461 million to a low of $167 million over the two hours. This led to upset users and accusations of insiders selling their allocated tokens in advance. One user noted that Jesse Pollack, the founder of Coinbase’s Base chain, received 2.1 million ZORA tokens as part of the airdrop. Pollack has been promoting ZORA and has had to repeatedly apologize and clarify his actions while marketing the token.

Zora has allocated 45% of the airdrop for its team and strategic contributors and 25% for its project-controlled treasury and liquidity pools. The token will also give holders no voting rights, as Zora is essentially claiming the token and airdrop are just for fun. BaseScan is working again at the time of writing.