Convert between ZK and US dollars at the live rate.
$0.320983
−97.07% from current
$0.009136
+2.85% from current
Independent editorial ranking. Score is 0–10 across six criteria: Security, Fees, UX, Features, Support, Reputation.
US and EU users who prioritise a spotless security record — no major hack since 2011 — and want a serious pro-grade trading terminal.
Institutions and funds requiring an SEC-registered venue with segregated qualified custody and audited on-chain reserves.
Active spot traders chasing the deepest global liquidity and the widest listing catalogue outside the US perimeter.
Traders who mix spot and on-chain — the Web3 wallet, DEX aggregator and Ethereum L2 X Layer sit inside the same account as CEX pairs.
Long-horizon EU holders who want the oldest continuously-operating exchange (2011) with conservative listings and full MiCA licensing.
Derivatives-first traders who want tighter perp funding and a maker-friendly fee schedule; accept offshore regulatory footprint.
Top coins in the same category, ordered by market cap.
ZKsync is an Ethereum scaling project built by Matter Labs, the team Alex Gluchowski and Alexandr Vlasov founded in 2018. The first product, ZKsync v1 (later renamed ZKsync Lite), shipped in 2020 as a payments-focused zk-rollup. The current flagship, ZKsync Era, hit mainnet in March 2023 as a zk-rollup with EVM-compatible execution, and the brand was tightened to "ZKsync" with the lowercase k in 2024 alongside the launch of the broader ZK Stack.
The ZK token went live on June 17, 2024 through one of the largest zk-rollup airdrops by participant count. Total supply is 21 billion ZK, with a multi-year unlock schedule covering the team, early investors (Andreessen Horowitz, Blockchain Capital, Dragonfly, Lightspeed, Placeholder, after roughly $458M raised in total), and the wider ecosystem. ZK is a governance token. It coordinates the Token Assembly, the Security Council, and ecosystem programs across the ZK Stack chains, but it does not pay native staking yield to passive holders, which is one of the parts of the design that gets argued about.
ZK trades against the dollar, USDT, and USDC across major venues. The quote on this page is volume-weighted across the exchanges with the deepest order books and refreshes every 60 seconds. Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, KuCoin, and Bybit usually carry most of the size.
What moves ZK on any given day:
Live prices stream into the card above. The analysis below uses the levels at page load.
ZKsync Era is a zk-rollup that runs Solidity contracts and behaves like an EVM chain for most practical purposes. The execution layer is a custom zkVM rather than a one-to-one EVM equivalent. Most contracts deploy without changes, but a handful of opcodes diverge from full equivalence, and a small number of contracts need adjustments before they work on Era. The trade-off is intentional. Matter Labs picked the design that makes proving cheaper and faster, at the cost of needing a slightly different toolchain in the corners where the EVM specification gets weird.
Validity proofs settle to Ethereum L1. There is no seven-day optimistic challenge window: once a proof is verified on L1, withdrawals finalize. That is the part of the zk-rollup pitch that matters most for institutional flows, where the seven-day delay on optimistic rollups is a real operational friction.
Account abstraction is native at the protocol level rather than bolted on through ERC-4337. Every account on Era is a smart account by default, which is why apps on the chain can offer features like paying gas in arbitrary tokens, multi-signature setups, and session keys without separate infrastructure.
ZK Stack is the open-source modular framework Matter Labs released to let teams launch their own ZK-powered chains. Each chain built on the stack is called a hyperchain. Every hyperchain is independent: it has its own block production, its own fee market, and its own choice of data availability, but it shares the proving infrastructure and the surrounding tooling.
The Elastic Network is the aggregation layer that connects them. It coordinates proofs across hyperchains and exposes shared liquidity, so assets and messages move between chains without the typical cross-chain bridge counterparty risk. Atomic transactions across hyperchains are the headline use case: a swap that touches two or three chains can settle as one operation rather than as a sequence of bridge hops, which is the part of the design that is hard to reproduce on any other rollup stack today.
ZK Stack also supports validium mode, where data availability lives off-chain rather than on Ethereum L1. Validium gives lower fees at the cost of a trust assumption around the DA committee, and hyperchains pick whichever fits their use case. Games and high-volume consumer apps tend toward validium; DeFi and serious treasury flows tend to stick with full rollup mode.
A short list of chains already shipping on the stack gives a sense of the spread. The pattern is consistent. Teams that want their own block space without building consensus from scratch pick ZK Stack, and the resulting activity bubbles back up into the wider ZKsync ecosystem.
For ZK holders, the hyperchain story matters because every chain on the stack is a customer of the proving infrastructure and, in most cases, a participant in ZKsync governance. The wider the hyperchain footprint, the harder it is for the zk-rollup category to consolidate around a single competitor.
ZK launched on June 17, 2024 with 21 billion total supply. The initial circulating float covered the airdrop allocation; the rest is spread across team, investor, and ecosystem buckets that unlock over a multi-year schedule. Cliffs are public and tracked on community dashboards, which is what makes unlock dates a regular factor in price action.
The airdrop itself was the part that did not go cleanly. Matter Labs published a Sybil-detection methodology aimed at filtering out farming addresses, but the result excluded a meaningful number of real users, including longtime ZKsync Lite holders and Era depositors who fell below opaque thresholds. Some farmed addresses still got through. The reception in the community was mixed at best, and the airdrop discourse weighed on ZK price for months after the launch. The all-time high near $0.32 was set in the hours immediately after the token became tradable; most of the price action since has been below that level.
ZK is a governance token across the ZK Stack. Holders vote in the Token Assembly, elect the Security Council, and direct ecosystem program funds. There is no native protocol staking that pays yield to passive holders, and proposals to add ZK staking have been discussed in governance without shipping at the protocol level. Holders earn nothing from ZK unless they actively trade it or LP it themselves.
Two paths are reasonable. If the goal is to use ZKsync Era or any hyperchain, bridging from Ethereum L1 is the cleanest way to fund a wallet. If the goal is to hold ZK for price exposure, a centralized exchange is faster and skips the bridge mechanics.
Send a small test transaction first when moving large amounts between chains. A $1 test beats a misrouted five-figure withdrawal that lands on the wrong network.
Airdrop-aftermath sentiment is the structural risk most ZK holders underestimate. The token has carried a sourer base of holders since launch than tokens that shipped cleaner distributions, and that overhang shows up in how the market reacts to news. Several other risks stack on top.
This page is information, not financial advice. Talk to someone licensed before allocating real capital.
Analysis last updated:
ZKsync (ZK) trades at $0.009397 with a 24-hour volume of $4.74M and a market capitalization of $94.91M. The asset is currently ranked #274 among all tracked cryptocurrencies.
In the last 24 hours, the ZK price has fallen +1.46%. On a seven-day window, ZKsync has retraced +1.84%, under sustained selling pressure on both windows. Short-term moves are often amplified by liquidity, news flow, and derivatives positioning, so confirm signals across multiple indicators before acting.
ZKsync's all-time high of $0.320983 was set on June 17, 2024. The current price sits +97.07% below that peak. Distance from the all-time high is a common reference point when evaluating long recoveries and macro support or resistance.
Buying ZKsync (ZK) is a five-step routine once you have picked the right venue and pair. The steps below mirror what most investors do today.
You can also use the ZKsync converter above to estimate how much ZK you would get for a given dollar amount before placing the order.
Whether ZKsync is a good investment depends on your goals, time horizon, and tolerance for volatility. Like all cryptocurrencies, ZK carries real market risk: prices can rise or fall sharply in a day, and past performance is not a reliable indicator of future returns.
This page provides data and analysis for educational purposes only. It is not financial advice. Always do your own research, diversify, and never invest more than you can afford to lose.
