Vitalik Buterin’s post about ZKsync does not mention the ZK token at all. It went up at 03:39:15 UTC on Thursday, October 15, per the timestamp inside its post ID. Binance’s one-second candles show the last trade before it at $0.01525, and the first one after it at 03:39:16, when 63 trades moved $4,602 between $0.01526 and $0.01533.
The ZK price closed that one-minute candle at $0.01630, up 6.7% from the $0.01527 open, on $738,000 of trading. The nine minutes before it had averaged about $5,400 a minute. Binance spot reached $0.01880 at 05:38 UTC, 23% above the last pre-post trade, and CoinGecko ranks ZK at #192.
A Post About Prover Speed, Not About a Token
The text is short. Buterin congratulates the ZKsync Airbender team on a milestone and writes that the battle for speed is, in his words, definitively won, so zkEVM teams should now put security first. He then lists three things he wants formally verified: that the arithmetization matches the Ethereum spec, that there is a hard maximum on prover cost per unit of gas in a block, and the security of the proof system itself.
Nothing in it names a price, a token or a listing. A link card under the text points to a ZKsync post from October 13, which is covered below.
ZKsync Posted Airbender Prime Two Days Earlier and the Chart Barely Reacted
ZKsync published its own Airbender Prime announcement at 14:15:29 UTC on Tuesday, October 13. In it ZKsync calls the prover the first, to its knowledge, to show real-time Ethereum proving on a single GPU. One NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell card, it says, proved 99% of 7,200 consecutive mainnet blocks in under 10 seconds each, and every block finished in under 12. Those figures are ZKsync’s own test results, not an outside audit.
The ZK price had already climbed 6.9% by the time that post went up. It traded at $0.01579 at 14:01 and at $0.01688 by 14:14. Then came the post, and the next 18 minutes stayed in a narrow band, $0.01648 to $0.01706. Only $167,000 changed hands in the 14:15 candle. Buterin’s minute drew $738,000. Nothing in ZKsync’s feed that we could see explains the 14:01 climb, so this report does not assign it.
Much of the larger move came before either post. Binance daily candles close at $0.01139 on Thursday October 8 and $0.01626 on Tuesday October 13, a gain of 43% in five sessions. The WAL report we ran Wednesday covers a different token.
Era Booked $361 in Fees While the Token Carried a $190 Million Cap
DefiLlama tracks ZKsync Era, the network, and lists its total value locked at $14.6 million. The chart on that page shows TVL peaking above $250 million in early 2025. Chain fees for the last 24 hours read $361. The fees endpoint puts the past 30 days at $12,862 and the past seven at $2,902.
Apps on Era brought in more, $66,234 in 24 hours of app fees on the same page, though DefiLlama counts those separately from the chain’s own take. ZK’s market cap on that page was $190.12 million and its fully diluted value $369.12 million. Era is the only ZKsync network DefiLlama tracks here, so other ZKsync products sit outside those totals.
The Next ZK Unlock Lands on Saturday
Tokenomist lists 173.08 million ZK to unlock on October 17, 2026, split between investor and team allocations. At the time we captured the page that was $2.99 million, or 2.46% of released supply. The September 17 unlock was the same 173.1 million tokens, which Tokenomist valued at $1.5 million then. The page marks the coming one as pending verification.
The same token count is worth twice as much now, since the ZK price roughly doubled between the two unlock dates. Released supply stands at 7.04 billion of 21 billion, a 33.52% float, per Tokenomist.
ZK Price Levels After a 96% Month
Daily RSI(14) read 69.1 on today’s unfinished candle, worked out from 250 Binance daily closes. The 20-day average is $0.01363, so price has cleared it. So has the 50-day, at $0.01148. The 200-day sits lower than the price too, $0.01218. On the daily chart the August low near $0.0072 starts the whole climb, and today’s candle ends in a long upper wick.
Binance’s ZKUSDT perpetual pays funding every four hours. The 04:00 UTC print was +0.005%, the 08:00 print -0.0117% and the 12:00 print -0.0182%, per its funding history. Open interest at 15:00 UTC was 458 million ZK, worth $7.2 million.
Starknet and Nillion rose on the same day, 17% and 16% on Binance’s 24-hour figures. Our STRK report and NIL report cover those tokens separately.
Up case: for the ZK price, a 1-hour close above $0.01880, today’s high, points to $0.02008, the May 8 high. A 1-hour close back under $0.01871 cancels it.
Down case: for the ZK price, a 1-hour close under $0.01661, yesterday’s high, points to $0.01494, today’s low, and then $0.01484, yesterday’s low. A 1-hour close back over $0.01670 ends that idea.
Bitcoin trades above its rising 100-day average. The unlock on October 17 is the one fixed date on the calendar.
