Bull season is all fun and games until you need to make a transaction on Ethereum.

During the wrong time of the day, a simple peer-to-peer transaction can cost you up to $40, while a peer-to-contract trade on a decentralized exchange like Uniswap or Sushi will set you back a kidney.

And if you’re lucky to get front-run or sandwiched by an MEV arbitrage bot—that’ll be two kidneys, please. Now you’re hooked up on a dialysis machine, wondering where your life went wrong.

But, who needs kidneys when we can all make money, right?

Just kidding, don’t worry—there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Ethereum knows it has to scale, and it’s already working towards solutions.

Today we’ll take a look at the most future-proof of these, which involves moving the network from a monolithic design, where consensus, execution, and data availability all happen on mainnet, to a modular design that compartmentalizes these functions and moves them to a separate, second layer.

Over the past year, a particular type of Layer 2 scaling technology called rollups has generated significant hype within the community, and for a good reason too. Rollups offer a way to save block space and consequently greatly reduce gas fees by outsourcing the transaction executions and computational data off-chain.

If you want to understand how the technology works in detail, check my colleague Tim’s recent piece on the subject, but long story short—via rollups, Ethereum could scale from 15 to 3,000+ transactions per second without sacrificing security.

As rollups are almost certainly Ethereum’s future, in this email, I’ll give you a quick rundown of the space and teach you how to use the currently available networks in hopes of getting you eligible for potential airdrops.

Two Rollups Walk Into a Bar…

Rollups come in two flavors: Optimistic and Zero-Knowledge. The former assume the transactions sent back to the mainchain are legitimate and only run checkups if someone submits a dispute or a fraud proof. Conversely, the latter run computation off-chain and submit validity proofs to the mainchain, demonstrating the transactions are legitimate.

The two leading Optimistic Rollups already live on mainnet are Arbitrum and Optimism, while the main ZK-Rollups are Matter Labs’ zkSync and StarkWare’s StarkNet.

While none of these projects currently have a native token, and most have denied—or at least denied to confirm plans on issuing one, there are still good reasons to believe that they’ll eventually do. The only project that has publicly confirmed a token so far is zkSync.

Now, right off the bat, neither I nor anybody else besides the projects themselves knows whether there’ll be any airdrops. We’re just speculating here. Pursuing this optionality is a gamble, albeit a positive expected value one (EV+).

Should tokens come out, they’ll likely be distributed or airdropped to users who’ve transacted on the networks and moved assets using their native bridges. Given that these networks are still largely experimental, I’d only play around with money I can afford to lose.

Optimistic Airdrops

First, let’s get the Optimistic Rollups off the table.

To qualify for potential Arbitrum and Optimism airdrops, you’ll likely need to move assets to the networks using their respective bridges and make some transactions.

I gave it some thought, and I believe the right play here is to first move some ETH to Arbitrum using the Arbitrum bridge. Connect your MetaMask wallet, select the amount of ETH you want to move, and click Deposit.

Suppose you don’t have enough ETH in your wallet. In that case, I suggest getting some via MetaMask’s native swap functionality, as that will likely make you eligible for its airdrop, which at this point is almost certain to happen.

Next, you want to move a portion of the ETH to Optimism using Hop Protocol. Hop Protocol is a fast and cheap rollup-to-rollup general token bridge rumored to do an airdrop—hence why we’re using it.

Once you receive your ETH on Optimism, you want to move it back to Ethereum mainnet using Optimism’s native bridge. There are three things to watch out for here.

First, you’ll need to add the Optimistic Ethereum network to your MetaMask wallet and switch to it to execute the transaction. MetaMask likely won’t have it pre-set, so use this link to add the network.

Second, you need to be careful and select Optimism as the preferred bridge to make the transaction. Don’t use Hop Protocol again; we want to use the Optimism bridge to ensure we’re eligible for the potential airdrop.

Last, it takes roughly seven days to get your coins back on mainnet (hence why everyone’s so hyped about ZK-Rollups), so don’t panic and just be patient.

Getting back to Arbitrum, you want to move your coins back to the Ethereum mainnet using the Across bridge, as it’s also likely to eventually issue an airdrop. Connect your wallet, switch to the Arbitrum One network, select your ETH amount and click Send.

ZK-Rollup Airdrops

As already mentioned, zkSync is the only rollup project guaranteed to issue a token.

There are two routes to take with this one. The first is to use the zkSync testnet by getting some faucet tokens from the forked Uniswap exchange on the network. Open this app, switch to the zkSync 2.0 Rinkeby Test Network in your MetaMask, and request tokens from the faucet.

The app will ask you to tweet a pre-set message, and after you’ve done that and everything goes well, you’ll receive some worthless testnet tokens to play with. If you’re jinxed like me, you’ll get an error message, and you would’ve wasted your time. There seems to be no fix, so just fuggedaboutit and look at the bright side of life—it’s testnet so at least you still have your kidneys.

To cover all grounds, move funds to the zkSync mainnet. Go to zkSync wallet, connect your MetaMask, set the amount of ETH you want to bridge, and click Add Funds. After your transaction has cleared (it could take up to 10 minutes), you’ll see the coins in your zkSync wallet.

While you’re at it, you might as well visit the ZigZag exchange on zkSync mainnet and make a few swaps there to make sure you qualify for its rumored airdrop. To move your coins back to Ethereum mainnet, use the same wallet, knowing that bridging from ZK-Rollups takes only minutes instead of days, because magic.

That’s it. You’re now hopefully eligible for a total of six airdrops: Arbitrum, Optimism, Hop Protocol, Across, zkSync, and ZigZag. Plus you’re ahead of the curve on rollups—the future of Ethereum scaling.