A fairly rare announcement: ZetaChain announced that it will **shut down its own native L1** on December 9 and officially migrate to the Solana ecosystem. A project shutting down its own chain is unusual in the public blockchain space. At the same time, it will launch ZetaLabs, a financial AI platform that tracks market developments through Radar and records users’ on-chain activity through Bloom, offering crypto AI services centered on privacy-preserving memory.
How should we view this “move with the whole family”? The pessimistic take: an L1 abandoning its own mainnet amounts to an admission that its native ecosystem failed to take off. ZETA holders will need to keep a close eye on announcements for changes to the tokenomics and on-chain benefits. The optimistic take: rather than slowly dying while clinging to a chain with no ecosystem, it’s better to put all available resources into competing on Solana, where liquidity is deepest. Solana is now the main battleground for RWA, AI, and payments applications, and ZetaLabs’ focus on financial AI fits right into that space.
This case serves as a wake-up call for all "believers in new public blockchains": the mid-game battle in the public-chain wars is over. Chains without ecosystems are exiting in droves (through migration, transformation, or shutdown), while capital and developers are accelerating their shift toward leading chains. The Matthew effect is more brutal at the crypto infrastructure layer than in any application sector.
Do you hold tokens from any of these "public chains in retreat"? Tell us in the comments whether you're getting out or staying put.
(Information from PANews; this is not investment advice.)