This week, in the East 8 Time Zone, the second-layer network Zero Network, incubated by Zerion, finally resumed operation after being technically monitored and found to have stopped block production for over 3 weeks. This new chain, originally positioned as a "wallet-native L2 entry," was described by the official team as "under maintenance" during the long period of inactivity, while community technical observers and affected users were more inclined to define it as a "serious outage." In publicly relayed information, the project team repeatedly emphasized that "user funds are safe and without loss," a key statement that has become the only anchor to ease emotions. However, for users forced to interrupt transactions and interactions, there remains a significant experiential gap between "account safety" and "freedom of use." This article attempts to explore a larger question along the lines of Zero's suspension and restart: as L2s frequently "submit assignments" on stability events, how will user trust be repriced, and how will Zero seek possibilities for its repair path and restart after this incident.

Three Weeks of Zero Block Production: A Suspension Wrapped as "Maintenance"

Public monitoring data shows that Zero Network stopped block production after a certain point in time, maintaining a state of over three weeks of zero block production, with on-chain activities falling into a long period of stagnation until recently when it was brought back online. For a newly launched L2 still in the cold start phase, such a suspension period far exceeds the conventional understanding of a "brief maintenance window," resembling a complete "pause" due to a systemic failure. However, throughout the process, the official narrative consistently revolved around "maintenance," without defining it as an outage or serious failure, nor providing more technical details, creating a clear contextual gap with the objectively verifiable fact of the suspension.

For ordinary users, the direct result of such a prolonged period without block production is that all operations relying on Zero are forced to terminate: assets cannot be freely transferred on-chain, contract interactions cannot be completed, and even if the application front-end is still running, the underlying settlement layer is already in a "non-responsive" state. More troubling is that the suspension occurred during a phase highly sensitive to network stability—many users were still in the process of conducting small trials and exploring ecological applications on the new chain, and a prolonged "black screen" easily erases the trust that has not yet solidified. This narrative discrepancy is not unique to Zero; in the L2 space, project teams tend to use relatively neutral terms like "upgrade" and "maintenance" to smooth over failures, while the community is more accustomed to using direct labels like "outage" and "shutdown" to restore feelings, laying a common background for the subsequent discussion of L2 trust structures.

Funds Allegedly Safe and Without Loss: Why is the Sense of Security Still Lacking?

During this suspension and restart process, the Zero team repeatedly emphasized a key piece of information: "user funds are safe and without loss." This statement originated from the project's public communications and has been relayed by various community channels and information aggregators, becoming the most important psychological buffer for external judgment of the event's severity. However, equating "the account numbers have not been stolen or emptied" with "the user's subjective sense of security has been restored" clearly underestimates the impact of such prolonged unavailability on trust.

For most users, "asset account safety" means that the on-chain balance has not changed abnormally, but if for several weeks this asset cannot be freely moved on the target network or participate in contract interactions, and cannot be timely migrated to a more stable environment, then this "safety" appears very fragile on the experiential level. Especially in the cold start phase of emerging L2s, early participants often carry the psychological expectation of being "test subjects." Once faced with prolonged unavailability, negative word-of-mouth can quickly spread through social media, directly weakening the willingness of subsequent new users to enter.

For a new chain like Zero, the brand damage caused by a long-term suspension affects not only users but also extends to developers and integrators. Wallets, bridges, and infrastructure services that have just decided to deploy applications or integrate support on Zero may very well reassess the value of collaboration after this incident: is it worth taking on the additional operational and customer service pressure for a chain that is prone to "going offline"? When technical details are long absent and the official team fails to provide a clear technical review, community discussions inevitably slide towards amplifying suspicion—people will fill the information void with questions like "Is there a systemic issue?" or "Are there other hidden dangers not disclosed?" In such a public opinion environment, the view that "outages erode trust more than losing funds" is increasingly emphasized, as it makes users realize that even if money was not lost this time, the risk of suddenly going offline at a critical moment still exists.

From Failure to Restart: The Involvement of Caldera and ZKsync

To understand the technical and ecological background of Zero's incident, it is essential to restore its basic profile. Zero Network is an L2 network incubated by the wallet product Zerion, positioned to provide its existing users with a smoother, lower-cost on-chain interaction environment, following the Rollup route, hoping to leverage Ethereum's security and its own product traffic to build a wallet-native scaling entry. Because of this, Zero was not designed as a completely "self-sufficient" chain from the outset, but rather deeply relies on the modular Rollup infrastructure ecosystem.

In the process from failure to restart, public information shows that Caldera, as a Rollup infrastructure provider, and ZKsync, as a technical support provider, both participated in the recovery work. Caldera's role is more akin to providing a "one-stop Rollup setup and operational support" commercial service for various projects, while ZKsync has a deep accumulation in zero-knowledge proofs and ZK Rollup technology stacks. The introduction of these external technical forces undoubtedly helps accelerate the fault location and recovery process, allowing Zero to come back online in a relatively short time; on the other hand, it objectively exposes the chain's shortcomings in technical self-research and operational capabilities, as well as its strong dependency.

From a broader perspective, this process raises a tricky question for the entire modular Rollup ecosystem: when a chain is highly componentized and relies on third-party infrastructure, does fault handling amplify collaborative advantages or deepen external concerns about "black box operations"? Users find it difficult to discern whether the issue lies with Zero itself or with the infrastructure layer, and it is also challenging to determine how to delineate responsibility boundaries. The more complex the relationship between the project team, infrastructure providers, and underlying technology stacks, the easier it is for external observers to fall into a fog of information asymmetry. This "lack of clarity" state itself erodes trust; even if the recovery is ultimately completed smoothly, it is difficult to fully compensate for the vulnerabilities exposed along the way.

L2s Frequently "Shutting Down": Why Users Are Growing More Impatient

Placing Zero's incident within the larger context of L2 competition reveals a quietly changing evaluation system. Early users often prioritized performance metrics (TPS, confirmation time) and transaction costs when choosing new chains, but now, stability and operational capabilities are rapidly being elevated to an equally important position alongside performance and cost. The reason is straightforward: as the number of optional Ethereum L2s increases, users no longer need to tolerate frequent failures for a slight gas advantage or so-called "early opportunities."

From the perspective of end users, the coexistence of multiple chains means there are enough "backup options." Once a certain L2 experiences a prolonged suspension, even if the account funds ultimately prove safe, most users will psychologically categorize it as "high risk and unreliable," subsequently making "permanent migration" choices in asset allocation, application usage, and even recommending others. For retail users, the cost of re-adding RPC, re-bridging assets, and reacquainting themselves with a new chain is not high, but if they are locked on a "powerless" chain at a critical moment, the emotional cost incurred is extremely difficult to digest.

Developers and integration partners take a more rational view: deploying applications on a stability-questioned L2 not only implies potential additional operational burdens (such as frequently handling user error reports, rollbacks, re-synchronizations, etc.) but also adds reputational risks—users find it hard to distinguish whether the fault lies with the chain or the application, and often project negative feelings onto the front-end service. This risk premium directly affects the new chain's negotiating position when attracting quality applications and infrastructure support, making the already fierce competition in the "battle of a hundred chains" even more brutal.

At the industry level, L2s have long been packaged as "the main entry for Ethereum scaling" and "user-friendly execution layers," but a series of stability incidents are consuming the credibility of the Rollup narrative in reverse. If frequent suspensions like Zero's, lasting for weeks, occur during critical periods, the market will inevitably reassess whether the complex cross-layer interactions, security assumptions, and operational chains under the Rollup model have truly matured enough to support large-scale users and assets. Until such questions receive a strong response, each incident will invisibly dilute the premium of the entire track.

How Zero Can Repair the Cracks: The Harder Part Beyond "Resuming Operation"

As of now, several key technical details are still missing from the public information surrounding this suspension event: including the fundamental cause of the outage, what adjustments have been made to the underlying architecture and operational processes, and the specific technical path of the recovery plan. These contents have been explicitly marked as information gaps in the Research Brief and have remained silent in the project's external communications, making it impossible for the outside world to make substantive assessments of Zero's technical resilience and subsequent risks. In this context, "resuming block production" itself can only be seen as the starting point of the repair work, not the endpoint of trust rebuilding.

From feasible trust repair directions, Zero has at least a few paths to choose from. First, after restoring stable operation, it should promptly disclose a public post-mortem report, even if it does not involve sensitive implementation details, it should strive to explain the general categories of issues, the organizational and process shortcomings exposed, and the improvements that have been implemented or are planned. Second, it should introduce third-party security audits and independent monitoring dashboards to publicly quantify the network's health status, key indicators, and abnormal events, allowing users and integrators to perceive risks beyond the extreme method of "the chain suddenly stopping."

In terms of traffic and brand, Zero still holds an important card: the user base and recognition accumulated by Zerion as an upstream wallet product. If the project team can turn this incident into an opportunity for upgrading transparency and improving risk contingency plans, such as setting clear downtime notification processes, publicly disclosing the rhythm of recovery progress, and pre-designing compensation or reassurance mechanisms for long-term unavailability scenarios, then Zero still has a chance to gain "second takeoff" space in subsequent rounds of L2 competition. Looking further ahead, after similar incidents occur multiple times in the industry, the entire ecosystem is expected to gradually form a set of "post-incident standard actions": quickly informing the scope and impact at the initial stage of downtime, continuously disclosing the progress of investigation and repair, and proving to users through data and system updates after recovery that this lesson has been written into the system memory, rather than simply covered up with a statement of "maintenance completed."

An Outage is More Than Just the Cost of a Technical Incident

Reviewing the entire process from Zero's prolonged suspension to its resumption of block production, several clear nodes can be identified: the over three weeks of zero block production recorded by on-chain monitoring, the official insistence on downplaying the nature of the event by using "maintenance," the emphasis on "user funds are safe and without loss" relayed by multiple parties, and the eventual recovery operation assisted by external technical forces. Comparing these facts with the community's real feelings, it is not difficult to find a significant misalignment between the two: for many firsthand witnesses, this was not a passive acceptance of a "maintenance arrangement," but rather a long period of anxiety spent in information opacity and the inability to freely manage assets.

As the L2 space enters an increasingly brutal competition phase, merely competing on performance and low fees is no longer sufficient; stability and transparent communication are becoming the new core moats. This incident for Zero has taught both users and developers a lesson: when allocating assets and deploying applications in a multi-chain world, it is not enough to focus solely on incentives and ecological narratives; how to assess a chain's operational capabilities, fault response processes, and willingness to "speak the truth" must also be included in the decision-making framework.

For Zero and other emerging L2s, future differentiation may increasingly depend on how they handle similar crises: some projects can turn an outage into a catalyst for governance upgrades and increased transparency, regaining some of the lost trust through clear reviews and institutional improvements; while others may quietly be marked by users and developers with a "will not return" label after a "suspension packaged as maintenance." When there are enough choices and migration costs continue to decrease, what will truly be expensive is not the technical incident itself, but whether the project still has the opportunity to be trusted again after the incident.

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