Today, Monday, May 6, 2024, the trading of the ZERO token by ZeroLend has been launched.
Exchange pairs have been launched on eight centralized exchanges and one DEX: OKX, Bybit, KuCoin, Bitget, MEXC, HTX, Gate.io, and Poloniex, plus the decentralized exchange Lynex.
Summary
ZERO, the token of ZeroLend
ZeroLend is a DeFi lending protocol on Linea, zkSync, Blast, and Manta.
Linea a sua volta è una blockchain su cui il liquidity layer nativo è proprio il DEX Lynex.
ZERO is the governance token of ZeroLend.
The peculiarity of ZeroLend is to be a DeFi lending market on layer-2, and in fact Linea is a layer-2 on Ethereum.
Linea is a blockchain launched just last year, and in the meantime has already raised over 270 million dollars in TVL.
By combining the four layer-2s on which ZeroLend is present, the protocol has already surpassed $200 million in TVL, making it one of the main protocols for TVL on both Linea and Manta.
The ZERO token of ZeroLend, however, should not be confused with other tokens that have the same ticker, ZERO, even if they have different names.
Using OKX exchanges as a reference, where ZERO is recording the highest volumes, its opening price this morning was 0.25 cents of a dollar, but already in the first minute of trading, due to high volatility, it rose to a maximum of 1.3 cents.
Excluding these strong initial fluctuations, the price is doing nothing but oscillating around 0.75 cents of a dollar, with fluctuations up to 1.0 cents and below 0.6 cents.
This is a launch characterized by overall good trading volumes, and relatively low volatility, excluding the first few minutes of trading.
The characteristics
The feature of the ZERO token highlighted on the official ZeroLend website is staking.
Staking ZERO tokens means receiving, in addition to the classic staking rewards, also voting rights and potential future incentives for other protocols.
Always on the official ZeroLend website you can also find the page where you can request the claim of these tokens.
In fact, owners of earlyZERO and Zero Gravity Points can request their share of ZERO tokens by connecting their wallet to this page.
ZeroLend: The ZERO token TGE
The token generation event (TGE) of ZERO actually took place last month.
With this token generation event, the tokens were physically created on the various blockchains, but the distribution occurred at a later time.
Now earlyZERO and Zero Gravity Points holders can claim to receive the new tokens on their wallets.
Note that 35% of the tokens were distributed during the Private Sale, but 53% will be distributed to the community in four steps: airdrop (18%), liquidity (10%), emissions (20%), and treasury (5%). The rest will go to advisors (7%) and the team (5%).
In order to make ZERO’s tokenomics sustainable in the long term, the majority of token distribution will end within a year of the token launch. Therefore, most tokens will be distributed by April 2025.
Subsequently, emissions will be reduced by half every 12 months.
Overall, 78% of the total supply will be distributed within the 12 months following the TGE, while the remaining 22% will be released in the following years.
The total supply is 100 billion ZERO tokens, of which only a quarter (25 billion) have been put into circulation so far.
DeFi lending
Since exchanges play an important role within the decentralized finance sector, and leverage trading is also done on DEXs, lending is a crucial service for the success of DeFi.
For example, the third largest DeFi protocol by TVL is actually a lending protocol, with two lending protocols in the top five in this particular ranking.
ZeroLend is already among the top 15 lending protocols with the highest TVL in the DeFi sector, although from this point of view it is far from the top seven, which each have over a billion dollars in TVL.
However, this is a protocol that was born only last year, and specifically dedicated to layer-2, while for example the world’s largest one (Aave, with over 10 billion dollars of TVL) has been around for four years, and operates on as many as 12 different chains including the main layer-1 ones.
However, it is worth noting that ZeroLend is the only DeFi lending protocol among the top fifteen, in addition to Aave and Compound, to be active on at least 6 chains.
The fact is that with the increasing use of layer-2, especially those on Ethereum, it would be useful for DeFi protocols to be active on multiple chains, and in particular on both layer-1 and layer-2.
From this point of view, ZeroLend seems to be superior to other similar projects, even though it is focused only on layer-2.
