ZetaChain token migration to Solana wins 99.4% approval, Layer 1 shutdown looms

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ZetaChain’s community has just voted to pull the plug on the project’s own blockchain and rebuild its future on Solana. The ZetaChain token migration cleared its first major hurdle on Sunday, September 20, when holders approved Proposal 68 with 99.4% support, setting in motion a plan to shut down the network’s Layer 1 chain and move the native ZETA token onto Solana as a native SPL asset.

Key takeaways

ZetaChain holders approved Proposal 68 with 99.4% support to shut down the Layer 1 blockchain and migrate ZETA to Solana.
Voting participation reached 58%, comfortably clearing the 40% quorum requirement.
ZETA will convert 1:1 into a native Solana SPL token, keeping its ticker and total supply, though decimals shift from 18 to 9.
ZETA on Ethereum and BNB Chain is excluded from this migration plan.
A second governance proposal, still pending, will set the final snapshot, shutdown timeline, and exchange coordination details.

Governance Vote Approves ZetaChain’s Move to Solana

The vote gives ZetaChain‘s core contributors a green light to begin preparing the technical groundwork for the ZETA Solana migration, without yet triggering an actual shutdown. Proposal 68 closed at 10:58 a.m. ET on September 20 with 99.4% of votes in favor, according to the project’s governance portal. Opposition and abstentions each came in at just 0.3%.

Voting Results and Participation

Turnout was strong enough to make the outcome hard to dispute. Participation reached 58% of eligible stake, well above the 40% quorum ZetaChain required for the proposal to pass. That level of engagement suggests the community was largely aligned on the direction of the project, even as the practical mechanics of the transition remain unsettled.

Crucially, passage of Proposal 68 does not flip a switch. The existing ZetaChain blockchain keeps running, validators keep validating, and ZETA staking remains active. Nothing about holders’ current token balances changes as a result of this vote alone.

What Changes Technically for ZETA Holders

Once the transition is complete, ZETA will exist as a native token on Solana rather than on ZetaChain’s own Cosmos SDK-based chain, and holders will need to understand a few technical shifts before that happens.

Token Conversion and the Decimal Precision Shift

Under the approved plan, ZETA converts 1:1 into a native Solana SPL token. The ticker stays the same, the total supply stays the same, and no new tokens get minted in the process. Vesting schedules already in place are expected to continue under their original terms.

One technical wrinkle deserves attention: native ZETA currently runs on 18 decimal places, while the proposed Solana version would use just nine. That means very small fractional balances could get rounded down during the conversion process, a detail that matters more for holders with dust-sized amounts than for typical wallets.

ZETA on Ethereum and BNB Chain Stays Put

Not every version of ZETA is part of this plan. The migration proposal applies specifically to ZETA native to the ZetaChain blockchain. Tokens already issued on Ethereum and BNB Chain fall outside this particular migration and are not affected by Proposal 68.

The Road Ahead: A Second Vote and Exchange Coordination

Nothing about the actual shutdown of ZetaChain’s Layer 1 is locked in yet — that depends on a second governance proposal that hasn’t been put to a vote. This matters for anyone holding ZETA on an exchange or bridged across chains, because the timeline and mechanics of the swap are still being worked out.

What the Next Proposal Must Decide

The follow-up proposal is expected to nail down the block height for a final balance snapshot, the actual migration mechanism, the process for claiming ZETA on Solana, and the timeline for halting the existing Layer 1 network. It’s also expected to address how much time users get to withdraw connected-chain assets before the shutdown takes effect.

Exchange coordination is a prerequisite ZetaChain has flagged explicitly: the project says it won’t bring the second proposal to a vote until exchanges have confirmed their own token-swap procedures. No firm shutdown date has been announced. ZetaChain has also said it’s still exploring how staking and rewards would work once ZETA lives on Solana, according to a September 17 announcement from the project.

Some technical preparation is already visible. Migration-related tooling has appeared in ZetaChain’s public GitHub repository, including code for exporting ZETA state and calculating balances by address — the kind of groundwork needed to eventually produce a final snapshot, even though the snapshot date itself hasn’t been set.

Why ZetaChain Is Betting on Anuma

The ZetaChain Layer 1 shutdown isn’t happening in isolation — it’s tied directly to the project’s pivot toward Anuma, its private AI application, which the team says no longer requires an independent blockchain to grow. Moving both Anuma and ZETA onto Solana is framed as one combined transition rather than two separate decisions.

Anuma’s Growing User Base

ZetaChain says Anuma has attracted more than 300,000 users and processed over 1 million requests across 35 AI models, based on figures the project has published itself. The app runs on an encrypted memory system that lets users carry context across different AI models, and ZETA already plays a role inside it: holders can lock tokens in exchange for credits to spend on AI services.

In its own words, the ZetaChain team described the opportunity this way: “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 project also pointed to the operational burden of running its own Layer 1 as part of the reasoning behind the shift. In the migration proposal, the team wrote that “as a Cosmos SDK chain, ZetaChain inherits every upstream advisory and patch, and each one has to be coordinated across dozens of independent validators,” adding that “AI tooling is making such vulnerabilities easier to find, as the August 25 patch showed, so there will be more.” That reference lines up with a separate incident last month, when Cosmos Labs disclosed attacks against six Cosmos EVM chains — not including ZetaChain — in which attackers sold stolen funds for roughly $5.7 million.

This is where the broader significance of the vote comes into focus: rather than continuing to shoulder the maintenance costs of an independent Layer 1, ZetaChain is choosing to lean on Solana’s infrastructure and redirect its resources toward the AI application it sees as its main growth driver. For a project that raised $27 million in 2023 from backers including Blockchain.com and Jane Street Capital, and launched its mainnet the following January, this marks a fairly sharp change in direction — from building interoperability infrastructure to running a consumer-facing AI product on someone else’s chain.

Validators will continue operating ZetaChain’s existing network, and ZETA staking remains active, until the shutdown process is formally approved through that second governance vote. In the meantime, ZETA’s price dipped roughly 2.5% over the 24 hours following the vote, a modest move that suggests markets are still digesting what a multi-stage transition actually means for the token’s near-term trajectory.

FAQ

What did the recent ZetaChain governance vote approve?

ZetaChain token holders approved Proposal 68 to shut down the Layer 1 blockchain and migrate ZETA to Solana, with 99.4% of votes in favor.

Does the approval of Proposal 68 mean the immediate migration of ZETA tokens?

No. Proposal 68 authorizes preparation for the migration but does not cause an immediate shutdown or token transfer. A second proposal still needs to finalize the details.

How will ZETA tokens change when migrating to Solana?

ZETA will convert 1:1 into a native Solana SPL token, keeping the same ticker and total supply. However, decimal precision will change from 18 to 9 decimals, which could round down very small balances.