A New Home on Solana: ZETA Migration Wins 99.4% Vote

ZetaChain (ZETA) tokenholders approved a plan to wind down the project’s Cosmos-based Layer 1 blockchain and migrate its native ZETA token to Solana, with governance Proposal 68 passing at 99.4% support and 58% participation, according to the primary source material. That turnout cleared the network’s 40% quorum requirement by a wide margin.

The vote does not switch off ZetaChain overnight. Core contributors must still submit a second proposal defining the shutdown timetable, and until that proposal passes, the existing Layer 1 keeps running.

Under the approved plan, ZETA is set to become an SPL token on Solana through a 1:1 conversion, keeping the same ticker and total supply, according to the source. No new tokens would be created in the process.

A second governance proposal still has to nail down the mechanics: the snapshot block height used to calculate balances, the withdrawal window for assets tied to other chains, the shutdown timetable itself, the token-claim process, and the exchange conversion period. Validators will keep operating, and staking rewards will continue through the transition, per the source.

Worth noting: the current proposal specifically covers ZETA native to ZetaChain. ZETA has already been issued on Ethereum, and BNB Smart Chain sits outside its scope. Anyone tracking Solana’s broader infrastructure push might also look at the recent Solana slot-time upgrade, since network performance is part of ZetaChain’s pitch for the move.

ZetaChain launched in 2021 as an interoperability project built to connect assets and data across different blockchains, and raised $27 million in 2023 from investors including Blockchain.com, Jane Street Capital, Human Capital, and Sky9 Capital to build out that Layer 1. Four years later, the project says running its own Cosmos SDK-based chain no longer serves its current priority: Anuma, a privacy-focused AI application, and the Private Memory Layer underneath it.

ZetaChain describes the Private Memory Layer as letting users carry encrypted context across different AI models – a company claim about the product’s design rather than an independently verified security audit. The project reports more than 300,000 Anuma users and over one million requests processed across 35 AI models, figures attributed to ZetaChain’s own published data. Shifting resources away from blockchain maintenance and toward that application is the stated rationale for the migration.

ZetaChain’s proposal points to the operational burden of running Cosmos SDK infrastructure, including coordinating upstream software upgrades and security patches across its validator set. It cites an Aug. 25 Cosmos EVM security response as an example of that ongoing work – though ZetaChain itself was not named among the networks exploited in that incident.

The project has its own security history to reckon with. ZetaChain suffered a reported $334,000 exploit in April targeting its cross-chain gateway contract, and later acknowledged dismissing an earlier bug bounty report about the vulnerability as intended behavior – a lapse that prompted a review of its security processes.

ZetaChain isn’t alone in walking away from a standalone chain. BounceBit retired its own Layer 1 in August after an authorization flaw let attackers steal roughly $3 million in BB tokens, migrating to BNB Smart Chain at a 1:1 ratio instead of rebuilding. Harmony proposed a similar exit on Sept. 6, planning to move its ONE token to Ethereum as an ERC-20 alongside a pivot toward AI video, following an exploit that forced a rollback of more than 109,000 transactions.

Those cases don’t prove every standalone chain is doomed, but they do show a pattern of projects concluding that maintaining independent consensus is no longer worth the cost when a larger ecosystem – often Solana or Ethereum – can carry the token instead. For traders watching what a Solana-based application economy actually looks like, Jupiter’s recent Lend v2 smart collateral rollout is a useful reference point for the kind of DeFi activity ZETA would be entering alongside.

Established in 2013, 99Bitcoin’s team members have been crypto experts since Bitcoin’s Early days.

Alex is a seasoned cryptocurrency trader and market analyst with over seven years of active experience in the digital asset space. Since entering the markets in 2017, Alex has specialized in identifying emerging "meta" trends and high-volatility narratives. Notably, Alex... Read More