ZetaChain's holders retire a $27m Layer 1 after 32 months of mainnet

The approval share multiplied by the turnout puts about 57.7% of eligible stake behind the proposal, and the opposed share works out to roughly 0.17% ^[1][2]. Around 42% of staked ZETA did not vote at all ^[3]. The token fell about 2.5% in the 24 hours after the result, per The Block's ZetaChain Price page ^[18].

The proposal argues upkeep. "As a Cosmos SDK chain, ZetaChain inherits every upstream advisory and patch, and each one has to be coordinated across dozens of independent validators," the migration proposal states ^[10]. It goes on: "AI tooling is making such vulnerabilities easier to find, as the August 25 patch showed, so there will be more" ^[11]. Cosmos Labs disclosed attacks last month on six Cosmos EVM chains, and the attackers sold the stolen funds for about $5.7 million; ZetaChain was not one of the six ^[12]. A researcher had reported the flaw months earlier, and testers mistakenly believed it could not be exploited on live networks, The Block reported at the time ^[13].

The report does not include fee revenue or treasury figures for the chain, so the case is made in engineering hours. One division the disclosed numbers do support is the raise against the life of the network, though nobody has said that was the spend rate. Mainnet was announced in January 2024 ^[5] and the shutdown vote closed in September 2026 ^[19], which is 32 months of live chain ^[4]. Divide the raise by that and you get about $840,000 for each month it ran ^[5].

Then Anuma. "What Solana's AI stack still lacks is the application layer: an app people use every day, with memory that belongs to them and travels across models, apps, and agents," the ZetaChain team wrote in its post about the vote ^[14]. Against that, the project's self-reported figures are more than 300,000 users and a million requests across 35 AI models since February ^[15], about 3.3 requests per user ^[6], or under half a request per user per month across seven months ^[7]. Holders lock ZETA for credits to spend on AI ^[16].

I'd expect the exchanges to set the calendar. The second proposal that fixes the snapshot and shutdown blocks will not go to a vote until they confirm swap arrangements, and ZetaChain has not given a date ^[7][8]. The conversion could still complete on the published terms, one-for-one into an SPL token with ticker and supply intact; the interesting term there is the exclusion of ZETA on Ethereum and BNB Chain ^[6]. It could also sit unfinished for months, with staking running on a chain already scheduled for retirement ^[9]. That view is wrong if the next proposal arrives with named exchanges, block heights and the staking design in one document.