Invest1 publisher2 min readPublished
ZetaChain shuts its Cosmos chain to follow a 300,000-user AI app onto Solana
Proposal 68 passed with 99.4% of a 58% turnout, converting ZETA one for one into a Solana SPL token and ending the Layer 1 that Blockchain.com and Jane Street Capital backed at its January 2024 launch.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Token holders approved Proposal 68 on September 20, retiring ZetaChain's independent Layer 1 and moving ZETA to Solana as a native SPL token, with 99.4% of a 58% turnout in favour.
- ZETA converts one for one with no new tokens minted and total supply unchanged, and its decimal precision drops from 18 to 9 to match Solana's SPL format.
- Anuma, the private AI application ZetaChain's team launched in February 2026, will migrate to Solana alongside the token.
- The network launched its mainnet in January 2024 with backing from investors including Blockchain.com and Jane Street Capital.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- exposure Only native Layer 1 ZETA converts, which leaves anyone holding ZETA on Ethereum or BNB Chain outside the one-for-one swap.
- decision Custodians, exchanges and validators cannot schedule anything until a second proposal fixes snapshot block heights, the claims process and an end date; the first proposal did not set one.
- capability Shutting the chain ends the cost of running a validator set, and the team stops competing in the omnichain interoperability category it was funded to build.
- contradiction The same report calls this a story about Anuma and also tells cross-chain buyers they now hold a different bet; those two readings put the loss on different parties.
Multiply the two published vote numbers and the mandate narrows. Participation was 58% and 99.4% of those votes backed the shutdown, while the other 42% of eligible voting power did not vote. That is about 57.7% of eligible voting power behind retiring the chain, and roughly 0.17% against it or abstaining. The published 99.4 and 0.3 add to 99.7, so 0.3% of participating votes is unaccounted for.
A holder's claim on supply comes out unchanged: one for one, no new tokens minted, total supply the same, vesting schedules as written. One mechanical detail matters to anyone accounting in small units. ZETA moves from 18 decimals to Solana's 9, which makes the smallest representable unit a billion times larger.
ZetaChain raised $27 million to connect blockchains. Anuma had more than 300,000 users when the vote came, about seven months after the app launched. The $27 million was not raised to build a consumer AI app, but set against that user count it works out to about $90 a user.
cryptobriefing.com, which reported the vote, wrote that the pivot "explains why an independent Layer 1 started looking less like a competitive advantage and more like overhead". I think that is the right reading of this decision, and it is a narrow one. ZetaChain put itself in an omnichain category with LayerZero, Axelar and Wormhole. The report does not say how those three are doing, so this vote cannot carry a claim that the category is failing.
If the token converts without friction and Anuma keeps its users on Solana, this will look like a product decision with a chain attached to it. The counter-case: an independent Layer 1 could not pay for its own validator set, and that is why a Cosmos SDK network roughly two years past its mainnet launch wound down.
What to watch
- What Anuma reports besides its user count once the app is live on Solana.
- Whether another Cosmos SDK interoperability chain files a comparable wind-down proposal.
- How exchanges handle the 18-to-9 decimal change in existing ZETA trading pairs.