In brief
- ZKsync has announced plans to deprecate its Lite network in 2026 as part of a long-signaled transition.
- Remaining funds on Lite total about $50 million, based on L2BEAT’s latest figures.
- Engineers expect all future development to center on zkEVM systems and ZK Stack deployments.
ZKsync, an Ethereum scaling solution made by Matter Labs, said Sunday that it plans to retire ZKsync Lite, the network it launched in June 2020 as Ethereum’s early zero-knowledge payment rollup, next year.
“This is a planned, orderly sunset for a system that has served its purpose and does not affect any other ZKsync systems,” the team wrote on X.
They added that ZKsync Lite was a “proof-of-concept” and “validated critical ideas” in the context of Matter Labs’ rollout of production versions of its zero-knowledge systems.
Those early developments later helped build out the systems that now underpin ZKsync Era and the ZK Stack.
“It did its job: prove what’s possible and pave the way for the next generation,” the team wrote.
The announcement formalizes a shift that began when Matter Labs rebranded ZKsync 1.0 to ZKsync Lite in February 2023. A month later, the lab ceased actively updating its engineering work for ZKsync Lite and moved its team to ZKsync Era and its broader ZK Stack.
At the time, Matter Labs’ head of engineering, Anthony Rose, told Decrypt that ZKsync Era would “definitely be an alpha version of the system,” acknowledging that they were not claiming it already was “the system that [we] expect it to be.”
Rose then projected roughly “two or three years” of “more engineering work to do” and confirmed that ZKSync Era would form the “core skeleton” of Matter Lab’s zkEVM ecosystem.
Lite was built as a lightweight system for transfers, NFT minting, and basic swaps. However, it did not support smart contracts, a factor that limited its long-term usefulness once general-purpose zkEVM designs emerged.
When Era went live in 2023 with full EVM compatibility, developers began consolidating liquidity and tooling around the newer stack. Wallets and decentralized apps then phased Lite out of their interfaces, reducing active usage to fewer than 200 daily operations this month, according to data from L2Beat.
Lite still holds roughly $49 million in value through its canonically bridged assets, which remain withdrawable to Ethereum through the network’s L1 contract.
ZKsync confirmed that withdrawals to Ethereum “will keep working” throughout the deprecation process and committed to publishing timelines and instructions in the coming year.
The announcement comes just over a year after Matter Labs revealed layoffs in September of last year, impacting 24 employees, as confirmed with Decrypt.
At the time, Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski said the layoffs were done in the context of a “big increase in demand for ZK Chains.”
Decrypt has reached out to Matter Labs and the Ethereum Foundation for further comment.
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