Aligned published the terms of its ALIGN airdrop on Tuesday, 20 months after registration for the drop closed. The company did not say when the token launches.
Every figure in the post is pegged to a token generation event that Aligned has not set a date for. The ALIGN contract on Ethereum records 26 holders and no transfers. CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap both carry preview pages with no price. And sale.alignedlayer.com, the site Aligned built for the public auction it announced in April, now displays one line: “THE SALE HAS BEEN CANCELED.”
Ten Thousand Token Line
The Genesis Drop covers 8.74% of a fixed 10 billion ALIGN supply, of which 44.36% unlocks at TGE, or about 3.88% of total supply.
It splits three ways. The main community allocation is roughly 6.54% of supply, and the cutoff for full liquidity is 10,000 tokens: wallets at or below that get everything at launch, while wallets above it get 10,000 tokens at launch and the remainder on a 12-month linear vest. The two groups also claim on different networks, with smaller allocations on Base and larger ones on Ethereum mainnet.
A third component, the ZK Arcade gaming campaign, accounts for 0.10% of supply and unlocks in full at TGE. Forty percent of it is split evenly among $NFT holders and 60% weighted by leaderboard score. Aligned capped premium tickets at 700 and says 522 NFTs were minted.
Protocol Guild Gets 1.5%
The second component, 2.10% of supply, goes to four named recipients Aligned calls Distinguished Contributors: Protocol Guild at 1.5%, and L2BEAT, onchain investigator ZachXBT and the Zero Knowledge Podcast at 0.2% each. Aligned releases 2.08% of that allocation at TGE, roughly 4.4 million tokens, and the balance linearly over 47 months, the longest schedule in the tokenomics.
Aligned pledged the Protocol Guild share in December 2024, above the 1% of token supply the guild asks projects to donate to fund Ethereum core development.
From 986,843 To 160,000
Aligned ran the drop as five waves through December 2024: repository contributors, Discord members holding the OG role, Galxe quest participants, the four Distinguished Contributors, and holders of Starknet, Mina, ZKsync, Polygon, Scroll, Taiko and EigenLayer tokens who held at least $50 worth at each token’s all-time low, priced off CoinGecko.
By Aligned’s own count on Dec. 18, 2024, 986,843 people were eligible. Eligibility alone did not qualify anyone, and by the time the separate registration closed, more than 160,000 wallets had signed up.
The pool also shrank. Aligned’s original tokenomics, published Dec. 11, 2024, put 44% of supply under a single “Ecosystem & Community” heading and set initial circulating supply at 3 billion tokens, or 30%. The April 2026 revision broke that block into Ecosystem at 18%, Future Provisions at 16.61% and the Airdrop at 8.74%, and cut circulating supply at launch to roughly 16%. Team and investor allocations held at 23.50% and 19.71%, with nothing unlocking for either until a 12-month cliff, then 40% at month 12 and 18 months of linear vesting.
Monad drew community pushback in November 2025 over a comparable split, a 3.3% airdrop set against more than 50% for insiders.
Two Sales, No Listing
Aligned has attempted two public sales. The first ran on CoinList from Jan. 16 to 23, 2025, offering up to 166,666,667 ALIGN at $0.03 and $0.04, for fully diluted valuations of $300 million and $400 million. Nineteen months later, CoinList’s sale page still lists the listing milestone as “To be announced” and still shows the original unlock schedules, which the April 2026 tokenomics revision replaced with faster ones.
The second, announced on April 3, 2026, was an English auction of 100 million ALIGN on Sonar, priced between $0.01 and $0.10 for an FDV range of $100 million to $1 billion, with bidding scheduled for April 13 to 16 and final settlement for May 12. Aligned then extended the KYC window three times: to April 28, then to May 5, then to May 11, each time posting that “Sale parameters remain unchanged.” The May 5 post is the last thing the account has said about the sale. No blog post explains the cancellation, and Tuesday’s airdrop post does not mention it.
The company raised a $20 million Series A led by Hack VC in April 2024.
The Layer They Deprecated
The product the airdrop was built around no longer runs. On July 21, Aligned deprecated its Proof Verification Layer, the EigenLayer AVS that went live in mainnet beta in November 2024 and that ZK Arcade was built on, telling its operators to deregister and shut down their instances. It cited maturing proof systems, Ethereum’s move toward native ZK support at the protocol level, and clients preferring full Ethereum security over low latency.
Its replacement, the Proof Aggregation Service, launched in mainnet alpha in January and supports only the SP1 zkVM. Aligned’s explorer shows 137,000 proofs verified and 9,000 batches over the deprecated layer’s lifetime against 223 aggregated proofs, with 26 operators and about $119 million restaked. The most recent verified batch is dated 55 days ago.
Aligned is also building LambdaVM, a RISC-V zkVM, with LambdaClass and 3MI Labs. A July 31 update said it passes all 72 RISC-V ISA compliance tests, the first zkVM to do so, and cut proving times 25%, with recursion, accelerators and security audits still ahead.
Recipients can check allocations at community.alignedlayer.com by connecting a wallet or a GitHub account. Accounts on X circulated claims this week that Coinbase had added ALIGN to a listing roadmap; Coinbase’s listings page shows no ALIGN entry, and neither Coinbase nor Aligned has announced one.
