ZetaChain tokenholders have approved a plan to wind down the project's layer-1 blockchain and migrate its native ZETA token to Solana.

Governance proposal 68 passed on Sunday with 99.4% support and 58% participation, exceeding the network's 40% quorum requirement — the minimum turnout needed for the result to be valid. Under the plan, ZETA will become an SPL token, the token standard used on Solana, through a 1:1 conversion, keeping the same ticker and total supply.

The vote does not immediately trigger ZetaChain's shutdown or the migration. According to the proposal, core contributors will submit a second proposal detailing the withdrawal window for assets linked to other blockchains, the snapshot block height, the shutdown timetable, the token claim process and the exchange conversion period — the follow-up step that will set the concrete dates tokenholders need to track. Validators will continue operating, and staking rewards will continue during the transition.

ZetaChain said running its own Cosmos SDK-based layer 1 no longer supports its focus on Anuma, its privacy-focused artificial intelligence application. The project said moving to Solana would allow it to redirect resources from blockchain maintenance to Anuma and its Private Memory Layer, which lets users carry encrypted context across AI models.

ZetaChain was founded in 1 as an interoperability-focused project designed to connect assets and data across different blockchains — a mandate the migration now moves the project away from. In 2023, it raised $27 million from investors including Blockchain.com, Jane Street Capital, Human Capital and Sky9 Capital to develop its layer-1 network.

Other projects wind down standalone chains

ZetaChain is not the only project stepping back from its own chain. Others, including BounceBit and Harmony, have also announced plans to shut down their standalone blockchains — a pattern of teams retiring bespoke infrastructure and redeploying their tokens on larger, established networks instead.

In August, BounceBit opted to retire its standalone blockchain after an authorization flaw was exploited to steal about $3 million in BB tokens. Rather than restarting its layer 1, the project migrated its token to BNB Smart Chain at a 1:1 ratio.

On Sept. 6, Harmony proposed shutting down its layer-1 and migrating its native ONE token to Ethereum as an ERC-20, that network's counterpart to Solana's SPL standard, as part of a proposed pivot to an AI video initiative. The proposal came weeks after an exploit created unauthorized ONE tokens and led Harmony to plan a rollback of more than 109,000 transactions.

ZetaChain itself suffered a $334,000 exploit in April targeting its cross-chain gateway contract, which drained funds from ZetaChain-controlled wallets across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base and BNB Smart Chain. The project later acknowledged that it had dismissed an earlier bug bounty report about the vulnerability as intended behavior, prompting a review of its security processes.

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