zkSync Era, one of the most hyped and recent players in the layer-2 project scene on the Ethereum chain has been making a lot of noise. According to data from L2BEAT.com, the total-value-locked (TVL) in DeFi on the zkSync touched $121 million as of writing - within just 10 days of the public mainnet launch. Users rushed to farm the airdrop of the Ethereum rollup.

Over 43% of zkSync deposits of $115 million have been added into liquidity pools across DeFi platforms on the blockchain.

This comes after the recent magnificent success of the Arbitrum airdrop, where eligible wallets received a median airdrop of about 1250 ARB, instantly earning their owners $1500 in free cash. Now more users are flooding into the space to farm these returns and zkSync Era has turned out to be the next hot favorite of the community.  

Read: Arbitrum Announces Airdrop & Transition to DAO

zkSync Era is now offering its new zero-knowledge-based layer-2 to developers, giving them a first-mover opportunity to establish an economic moat within the fresh ecosystem. Further, these projects will also become eligible for a highly anticipated airdrop of the platform's native token, very similar to Arbitrum.  

TVL in DeFi on zkSync Era skyrockets!

As mentioned earlier, zkSync Era has been seeing incredible traction on its platform, as more and more people are rushing into the ecosystem, with millions of dollars in funds pouring in to capitalize on it as much as they can. According to data sourced from DefiLlama, another DeFi data aggregator, the TVL in DeFi has surged to nearly $54 million as of writing.

Out of this total of $54 million, over 95% of the TVL is captured by the four largest protocols on the platform, namely, SyncSwap, Mute.io, SpaceFi and GemSwap - all of which happen to be DEXes on the platform.

Out of the four, SyncSwap is the largest decentralized finance protocol on the platform, with nearly $29 million in TVL - having a total TVL dominance of over 53%. The remaining three protocols - Mute.io, SpaceFi, and GemSwap - each has about $12.5 million, $6 million, and $4.5 million respectively.

Thanks to this major runup on the DeFi front, native crypto tokens from these DeFi protocols on the zkSync Era ecosystem have been skyrocketing too. GemSwap's native token, ZGEM has jumped from $0.26 to a high of $2.59, recording a nearly 900% jump within a week of the token’s launch on March 28, according to data from CoinGecko. Similarly, SpaceFi's native crypto token has seen a 300%+ increase since the launch of the zkSync Era public mainnet launch.

Further, SuncSwap, the largest DeFi protocol on the platform does not have its own native token yet - thus could potentially bring about more airdrops in the near future too, after the anticipated zkSync airdrop.

The overall DeFi ecosystem has a lot of area for growth and the zkSync is one of the latest ones to capitalize on this growth potential and make rapid progress along the way. And with other major layer-2 projects like Arbitrum and Optimism having DeFi TVLs over $2.2 billion and $925 million respectively - there is a lot of catching up to do!

Values as on April 5, 2023.

Read more: Top DeFi Projects 2023