ZetaChain Holders Approve Shutting Down Its L1 and Moving ZETA to Solana

ZetaChain token holders have approved shutting down the project's own layer-1 blockchain and moving the ZETA token to Solana. Proposal 68 won 99.4% of votes on Sunday, September 20. The network itself is not closing yet, because a second vote is still required.

What ZETA holders approved

According to Cointelegraph, turnout in the vote reached 58%. The network's quorum is 40%. That is the minimum share of votes needed for a decision to count, and it was cleared by 18 percentage points. The proposal took 99.4%, so there was little serious opposition. Media reported the plan to close the L1 as early as September 19, a day before the vote ended.

ZETA will become an SPL token, meaning a regular Solana token similar to ERC-20 on Ethereum. The conversion will run one to one. The ticker and total supply stay the same.

The vote itself switches nothing off. The Block reports that another vote is needed to finish the migration. Core developers will submit a second proposal describing the transition. It is expected to cover these items:

• A window for withdrawing assets tied to other blockchains.
• The block height for the balance snapshot.
• The shutdown schedule.
• The token claim process and the exchange conversion period.

Validators will keep running, and staking rewards will continue during the transition.

Why the project is dropping its own L1

The proposal says that maintaining its own Cosmos SDK blockchain no longer serves the project's main goal. That goal is now Anuma, an AI app built around privacy.

Moving to Solana lets the team shift resources from maintaining the network to that product and to the Private Memory Layer. The feature lets users carry encrypted context across different AI models.

Solana is setting records of its own these days. According to Cointelegraph, the network recently saw a record 263,000 tokens issued in a single day. Decrypt reported on September 19 that the latest speed upgrade cut Solana's block time by 17%.

ZetaChain was founded in 2021 as a project for connecting different blockchains. In 2023 it raised $27 million from Blockchain.com, Jane Street Capital, Human Capital and Sky9 Capital to build its own layer-1 network. That direction is now being scaled back in favor of the AI app.

Who else is leaving standalone chains

Running its own L1 means a team is responsible for the network's code, its nodes and its security. Moving a token to someone else's blockchain removes those duties. ZetaChain is not the first to take that route.

In August, BounceBit decided to retire its blockchain after an exploit. An authorization flaw let attackers steal about $3 million in BB tokens. The project moved its token to BNB Smart Chain at a one-to-one ratio and did not restart its network.

On September 6, Harmony proposed shutting down its L1 and moving ONE to Ethereum as an ERC-20 token. The move is part of a pivot to an AI video project. The proposal came weeks after an exploit that created unauthorized ONE tokens and forced Harmony to plan a rollback of more than 109,000 transactions.

Security was a problem for ZetaChain itself, too. In April, a $334,000 exploit hit a cross-chain gateway contract and drained ZetaChain-controlled wallets on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base and BNB Smart Chain. The team later admitted it had earlier dismissed a bug bounty report about the flaw as intended behavior, and reviewed its security processes.

So within weeks, BounceBit, Harmony and now ZetaChain have all chosen to close their own chains. All three had an exploit beforehand, although ZetaChain ties its decision not to that but to the priority of Anuma.

What comes next

Next up are ZetaChain's core developers. The second proposal will show when exactly the network closes and how to claim tokens on Solana. ZETA holders still have to approve it before the migration starts.