Zilliqa and ZetaChain Are Both Walking Away From Their Own Layer 1s

Two independent blockchains gave up on being independent within the same day. On November 4 and 5, Zilliqa said it will turn into an Ethereum Layer 2 for regulated institutions, and ZetaChain opened a vote that would halt its Layer 1 on December 9 and move ZETA to Solana. WuBlockchain put the two side by side on X as both projects closing their networks.

That's roughly right, with two asterisks. ZetaChain's vote doesn't close until November 7. Zilliqa hasn't named a date for anything yet.

Zilliqa: "It Hasn't Worked"

Zilliqa launched its mainnet in January 2019 on the back of sharding, back when that was the pitch everyone wanted. In a pinned post on its X account, the team now says nine years of building and running its own Layer 1 "hasn't worked." The reasons it gives are thin usage, funding and liquidity, plus recent security incidents that showed how expensive a standalone chain is to keep alive, as PANews summarized.

The replacement is the Zilliqa Institutional Layer, an Ethereum L2 where only verified participants can transact. Identity and compliance run on vLEI credentials, with the Liechtenstein Trust Integrity Network, or LTIN, handling verification, according to Crypto Briefing. Lookonchain's write-up adds that LTIN would also run the sequencer, and that institutions come first, with individuals and AI agents later.

The ZIL token stays. Holders don't need to do anything right now, and the team says any swap or migration will be announced on its official website only.

Whether this is a rescue or a rebrand is a fair argument. A permissioned L2 is a long way from the open network that launched in 2019. It might also be the only version of Zilliqa that still has a business model.

ZetaChain: A Snapshot Block and a Deadline

ZetaChain's Proposal 2 sets the mechanics. Balances would be recorded at block 20,755,000, expected around December 9, and the chain would stop producing blocks for good. ZETA would be minted on Solana as an SPL token at 1:1, and the foundation would then revoke its minting authority. "Nothing moves until it passes," the team said in its announcement on X. Voting runs 72 hours and ends November 7 at 16:12 UTC, per crypto.news.

None of this is a surprise. In September, token holders passed Proposal 68 with 99.4% approval, as The Block reported. That vote picked the direction. This one picks the details. If it fails, the September decision still stands, but the team has to come back with a revised proposal.

The details matter for holders:

About 55 million ZETA from undistributed validator rewards would be burned over 12 monthly transactions in 2027, roughly 4.6 million each. Claims would open on ZetaHub on December 9, but addresses holding fewer than 10 ZETA can't use the individual claim route. Exchange-held balances follow whatever swap arrangements the exchanges announce. ERC-20 ZETA on Ethereum isn't touched. Anyone with ZETA in liquidity pools or wrapped-token contracts is told to exit before the snapshot, because wallet claims can't recover tokens held by contracts. Hacken is reviewing the claim portal, and the portal opens only after that review is published. An archive node stays up until at least October 31, 2027.

What replaces the chain is ZetaLabs, a private AI app on Solana that launches the same day. It builds on Anuma Chat, which the team has run since February and which, by the project's own September figures, passed 300,000 users. ZETA becomes the payment and access token, alongside USDC and cards, with premium features for lockers planned for the first quarter of 2027.

For a project that raised $27 million in 2023 from backers including Blockchain.com and Jane Street Capital, to build a chain that connects other chains, that's a hard pivot.

Two different bills for the same problem

Both teams point at the cost of keeping a chain running, and both had a rough 2026.

Zilliqa's came from a flaw in the signing code of its legacy Ledger app, present in every released version from 2019 to 2026. The first proven theft was on March 4. KuCoin noticed odd outflows from one of its cold wallets on July 19, and Zilliqa froze legacy transactions the next day. The post-mortem puts proven theft at 683.13 million ZIL across 66 transactions, with 6,772 accounts exposed, according to a recap of the report. The EVM side wasn't affected, and Binance has since backed a 1:1 migration to Zilliqa EVM. Upbit, meanwhile, said it will stop ZIL trading on November 16, with withdrawals open until December 16, per ChainCatcher.

ZetaChain's was smaller in dollars and more awkward in detail. An April exploit of its gateway contract drained about $334,000 from team-controlled wallets across four chains, and no user funds were touched. The post-mortem then admitted that the same class of bug had been reported through its bounty program and dismissed as intended behavior, as crypto.news covered. In the migration pitch, the team says that as a Cosmos SDK chain it inherits every upstream patch, and each one has to be coordinated across dozens of independent validators. It cites an August 25 security patch as an example.

So Zilliqa says usage never paid for the chain, and ZetaChain says the upkeep stopped making sense. Different wording, same invoice. And both exits lead to bigger networks: Ethereum for one, Solana for the other.

What Holders Should Watch

ZIL holders have nothing to do today. The thing to watch is Zilliqa's technical plan, which the team says will come before any swap, and the role the ZIL token ends up playing on the new network. Anyone still holding ZIL on Upbit has until mid-December to pull it out.

ZETA holders have a date. The vote closes November 7, the snapshot is expected around December 9, and the team has warned people to use official sites only and never share recovery phrases during the migration. Check what your exchange plans to do before the snapshot, not after.

The next hard deadline is November 7. Zilliqa hasn't given one.