ZKsync

Matter Labs launched the system later called ZKsync Lite in 2020 to make Ethereum payments cheaper with validity proofs. Era opened its public mainnet on March 24, 2023, extending the project to general-purpose smart contracts. Lite nevertheless remained in operation until May 4, 2026. Its sunset announcement argued that maintaining the older system indefinitely would consume security resources needed elsewhere; it published final balance data and a design for Ethereum withdrawals under Token Assembly governance. Ending the chain therefore also meant arranging an exit that would not depend permanently on its original operator.

The June 2024 ZK distribution had already expanded who could participate in such decisions. The airdrop assigned 3.675 billion tokens to 695,232 eligible wallets, using contribution criteria and, for users, activity and time-weighted asset balances rather than transaction count alone. Delegated voting gave that distribution institutional consequences: separate Governors handle protocol upgrades, token programs and governance operations, with Security Council and Guardian checks. The token arrived after both chains, as a means of changing their governance rather than a prerequisite for their original launch.

The claim period ended on January 3, 2025, but some distributor minting capacity remained. On April 15, a compromised administrative key was used to mint 111,881,122 ZK through three airdrop distributors. The project said the exploit did not compromise the protocol, token contract or governance contracts. The distinction mattered: the problem was a surviving distribution permission, not evidence that validity proofs had stopped working.

The response also exposed the practical power of an operator. Matter Labs, then Era’s sole sequencer, reported filtering attacker accounts while a return arrangement was negotiated. The arrangement offered a 10% bounty, so recovery should not be described as an unconditional return of every stolen asset. The Security Council later reported that recovered assets were converted into ZK and returned to the Token Governor Timelock through GAP-3. Governance had inherited both the proceeds and the question of what to do with them.

The token’s next change made voluntary destruction easier. ZIP-14’s execution was announced on December 9, 2025, introducing a self-burn function. This did not permanently shrink the 21 billion programmed ceiling: burning lowers minted supply, while future authorized minting can use available capacity and a protocol upgrade can change the ceiling. That distinction becomes consequential whenever a burn is presented as a lasting reduction in possible supply.

The staking pilot tested another use of ZK: rewarding holders who staked and delegated. Its administrators reported 4,397 participating addresses, a 355 million ZK peak and 5.3 million ZK in rewards for the February 9–May 11, 2026 first season. They paused the second season to revise the design and align it with proposed sequencer decentralization. A completed incentive experiment is therefore part of ZK’s history; a continuously available yield is not established by that experiment.

Meanwhile, the product effort moved beyond a single public chain. Prividium offers permissioned chains whose operators retain transaction data and full state offchain while proving state transitions to Ethereum. Atlas uses the newer Airbender proving architecture. These choices address different demands from Lite’s low-cost payments: institutions can restrict access, and execution technology can change without making every chain public or every operator interchangeable.

The link from that network to token demand changed with the product priorities. A Fee Flow deployment was reported in May 2026: approved fee assets could be auctioned for a fixed amount of ZK, with all received ZK initially routed to burning. But July’s revised v31 proposal removed Gateway-based public interoperability and its fees from this release. Staff attributed the change to institutions seeking private execution and direct Ethereum settlement. The fee code remained inactive; bringing it into production would require a future governance proposal and implementation steps, not merely completion of the revised v31 upgrade. An August 24 update then reported delay and review of that narrower release too. The distinction leaves ZK holders with a concrete consequence of the product choice: deployed fee-routing machinery without the proposed Gateway fee stream or a promised revenue distribution.

On September 4, Matter Labs said EraVM chains would begin transitioning within six months, while Atlas chains were unaffected. Ordinary externally owned accounts needed no immediate action; smart contracts and contract-based accounts would need forthcoming migration instructions. The announcement also proposed longer execution delays and additional verification, rather than reporting their universal activation. After Lite’s closure, Era’s planned transition makes the same engineering obligation visible at a larger scale: a replacement architecture needs a workable path for the applications and balances already using its predecessor.