Author: Frank, PANews
Since the airdrop, ZKsync has been plagued with bad news, with ecological data rapidly declining and token prices following suit, dropping from a high of $0.29 after launch to as low as $0.08, a decrease of 72.8%. Moreover, there were reports of a 16% staff layoff.
However, since September, new developments from ZKsync have been frequent, including hiring a Chief Marketing Officer from Solana; launching an on-chain governance system; and welcoming the migration of Treasure DAO. It seems ZKsync is on the path to recovery. PANews provides a comprehensive analysis of ZKsync's recent developments to see if this once highly anticipated star L2 is about to experience a revival.
Starting with Expanding Connections
The changes in ZKsync seem to have begun with the layoffs. On September 3, news broke that Matter Labs, the development company behind ZKsync, announced a 16% staff reduction, totaling 24 employees. This was the company's first layoff in its six-year history, and Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski clarified that the decision was not due to the company's financial situation, with plans for "strategic hiring" moving forward.
In fact, after the layoffs, ZKsync did experience a rejuvenation. On September 11, Matter Labs announced the hiring of Meghan Hughes, former Vice President of Marketing at the Solana Foundation, as Chief Marketing Officer. Previously, Meghan Hughes had worked at Google, Facebook, Niantic, and Stripe. Matter Labs revealed to the media that "hiring Hughes is to help Matter Labs share its story and elevate its narrative."
Two days later, ZKsync announced the launch of an on-chain governance system. This governance system is established around the principles of separation of powers and checks and balances. According to the design, no individual or entity can alter the ZKsync protocol. After Alex Gluchowski announced this news on Twitter, it sparked numerous discussions within the community. Among them, Solana co-founder Toly questioned the claim that ZKsync's new protocol was "not multi-signature." The discussion between the two remained theoretical and did not extend to other areas. However, this exchange still brought some attention to ZKsync.
On September 14, Karel Vuong, co-founder of Treasure, published a lengthy post on social media explaining why "Treasure DAO plans to migrate from Arbitrum to ZKsync." Karel Vuong stated that ZKsync is more conducive to the project's vision of large-scale adoption in terms of scalability, throughput, cost, gaming possibilities, onboarding, and interoperability. This was the main reason the team chose ZKsync.
On September 23, after a month of repeated testing, Aave V3 finally completed its deployment on the ZKsync Era mainnet.
On September 25, Coinbase announced it would list the ZKsync (ZK) token. Subsequently, the ZK token surged, with a maximum increase of 7.59% within 15 minutes, and on that day, it reached a peak increase of 14.5%, with a price of $0.14, marking the highest point in nearly two months.
Additionally, projects like Chainlink CCIP and Stratis also announced deployments on ZKsync.
Slight Improvement in On-Chain Data
In addition to expanding its influence in the ecosystem, ZKsync's on-chain data has also shown some improvement recently. Looking back at the data situation after the airdrop, it can be seen that both TVL, the number of on-chain transactions, and the number of active addresses have been in a downward trend since March. However, entering September, ZKsync has seen a noticeable rebound in these metrics.
On March 9, the TVL of ZKsync Era reached a peak of $188 million, but by August 5, this figure had dropped to $72 million, a decline of over 60%. As of September 29, the TVL of ZKsync Era rebounded to $140 million, experiencing a significant recovery.
Daily trading volume increases
A more noticeable change occurred in the number of daily active users. On September 9, the number of daily active addresses on ZKsync Era fell to a low of only 67,000. However, on September 17 and September 20, the number of daily active addresses saw a significant increase, rising to 159,000 and 164,000, respectively. At the same time, the number of on-chain transactions also experienced a sudden surge, with the number of transactions increasing by more than double from September 15 to September 20.
Signs of active user recovery
The growth in these metrics may stem from the gaming platform Tevaera within the ecosystem. According to DappRadar data, Tevaera has reached around 150,000 user addresses in the past 30 days, a growth of 160%. Another metric, the contract creation data on ZKsync Era, remains low and has not changed significantly, further indicating that this data growth may come from a specific application rather than a large number of new tokens being generated.
Still a Significant Gap with Other L2s, Airdrop Phase Selling Off Ends
When comparing with other Ethereum L2s, it can be seen that both Arbitrum and Base have TVLs exceeding $2 billion, while Optimism has $680 million. Although the project team has recently frequently introduced cooperative projects to increase ecosystem activity,
ZKsync still seems to have a long way to go.
As of September 26, the total number of created tokens within the ZKsync mainnet DEX was 507, with a 24-hour trading volume of less than $10 million. The number of users trading the most active token within 24 hours was only 333. From these data, it can be seen that the on-chain ecosystem activity of ZKsync has not truly begun to flourish.
From the market performance of the token, the ZK token has seen a slight rebound recently, with a 66% increase in price over the past four days. Currently, 17.5% of the circulating tokens are in circulation. No new unlocks will occur before June 2025. Considering the token airdrop distribution situation over the past three months, the price rebound of ZK may be somewhat related to the end of airdrop selling, along with recent cooperative news within the ecosystem, the listing on Coinbase, and the overall market recovery.
Overall, ZKsync's revival seems to still be some time away. However, ZKsync's development path differs from the recently popular Sui, as ZKsync has not launched a one-click token issuance MEME coin platform, but is temporarily relying on chain games like Tevaera to activate more users. If the recovery of chain games in the crypto industry replaces MEME coins as the next growth engine, ZKsync's reliance on chain games to break through in the L2 space may also be a good choice.
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