Zilliqa Gives Up on Its Own Chain After ZIL Loses 99%

• Zilliqa will stop running as an independent blockchain and rebuild itself as an Ethereum Layer 2 for regulated institutions.
• The team openly says weak adoption, scarce funding and rising security costs made its own network unsustainable.
• ZIL keeps its ticker and holders do not need to act yet, although the token’s economic role in the new network is undefined.
• The token trades at the lowest prices in its history after three separate security incidents this year.

Zilliqa, the sharding blockchain that ranked #25 on CoinMarketCap in May 2018, said on November 4 that it will abandon its independent Layer 1 and rebuild as an Ethereum Layer 2 for banks, funds and asset managers, a decision the team links to adoption that never arrived and a security bill it can no longer carry. The ZIL token, which survives under the same ticker, now trades at $0.001645 with a market capitalization of $33.94 million, about 96% below the roughly $900 million the project was worth when it sat among the top 25 cryptocurrencies.

We know it’s not great. For nine years we built and ran our own Layer 1. It hasn’t worked.

We’re not giving up. Here’s the first of many next steps in a new direction:

Zilliqa is becoming the Zilliqa Institutional Layer (ZIL): an Ethereum Layer 2 for regulated institutions.… pic.twitter.com/Mt4Zm9DuYb

— Zilliqa (@zilliqa) November 5, 2026

ZIL fell 9.7% in 24 hours as the news spread a day later, taking its seven-day loss to 18.2%. The new network will be called the Zilliqa Institutional Layer, and the team says holders do not need to take any action until it publishes further instructions.

Price Down 99.4%, Market Cap Down 96%

In the spring of 2018, sharding, a design that splits a network’s workload across parallel groups of nodes to raise throughput, was one of the most closely watched ideas in crypto, and Zilliqa was its best-known implementation. Its market value crossed $1 billion in early May that year and was still near $900 million later in the month, when it ranked #25.

The token price looks considerably worse than the market cap. ZIL set its all-time high of $0.2563 on May 6, 2021, and now trades roughly 99.4% below it, because circulating supply grew from about 11.5 billion tokens in 2021 to around 20.6 billion today. Each token now represents a smaller share of a valuation that has itself collapsed.

Sources: CoinMarketCap, DefiLlama, Zilliqa.

On the weekly chart, this week’s candle is down 12.2% after touching $0.0015456, a new record low, so there is no earlier trading range below the price where buyers have previously stepped in. The nearest meaningful level above is $0.0045805, the September high where the last recovery stalled, and reaching it would take a gain of roughly 178%.

ZilSwap Kept $192,520 of $239.5 Million

Crypto projects rarely call their own strategy a failure, but Zilliqa’s explanation for the move to Ethereum does exactly that, stating that “running everything on our own has stopped working.” The team says activity on its chain never reached the level an independent Layer 1 needs, and that funding and liquidity for standalone chains have dried up while this year’s attacks showed how costly it is for a small network to defend itself.

The project’s main decentralized exchange shows the adoption problem clearly. ZilSwap held $239.5 million in user deposits, known as total value locked, at its May 2021 peak, and DefiLlama now shows about $192,520. Some of that drop comes from users moving to newer venues, but very little capital stayed.

The choice of Ethereum as the new home has some history behind it. In July 2018, the blockchain game Etheremon said it would explore running its gameplay on Zilliqa because gas fees on Ethereum had become too expensive for players, which was exactly the problem Zilliqa’s early backers, Polychain Capital among them, had funded it to solve.

683 Million ZIL Lost Through One Ledger Flaw

According to Zilliqa’s August 20 post-mortem, the legacy Zilliqa Ledger app generated the random numbers in transaction signatures badly enough that attackers could rebuild private keys from signatures visible on the blockchain. The bug sat in every version of the app released between 2019 and 2026, and roughly five signatures from the same account were enough to expose its key. At least 683.13 million ZIL was stolen from 51 drained accounts, worth about $1.1 million at today’s price, and 6,772 accounts were exposed. In October, an exposed signing key opened the X-Bridge to Ethereum, and a flaw in legacy ZRC-2 tokens let an attacker mint unbacked tokens and swap them for ZIL. These are separate incidents, and their losses should not be added together.

The Ledger breach had already pushed Zilliqa to retire its legacy non-EVM system and move balances into its Ethereum-compatible environment over the summer. The November plan goes a step further and gives up independent settlement altogether.

A Telecom-Owned Firm Will Order Every Trade

On the new network, what lets a wallet transact is a verified identity, and its ETH or ZIL balance won’t matter. Participants will use verifiable Legal Entity Identifiers (vLEIs), a cryptographic version of the 20-character LEI code companies already use in regulatory reporting. Zilliqa also wants AI agents to trade on behalf of institutions, with their permissions tied to a specific legal entity.

Simplified view of Zilliqa’s proposed design, not a live deployment.

The Liechtenstein Trust Integrity Network (LTIN), majority-owned by Telecom Liechtenstein, will issue and revoke the credentials and will also run the sequencer, the component that decides the order of transactions before they reach Ethereum. That gives the network a state-linked operator, although the Liechtenstein government neither runs nor guarantees it. With one company controlling transaction ordering, the network starts out heavily centralized. Zilliqa has also not described its proof system or withdrawal mechanics, so nobody can yet judge how much of Ethereum’s security the new layer will actually inherit.

No Bank Has Signed Up Yet

Holders should keep this transition separate from the earlier legacy-to-EVM migration that Binance supported at a 1:1 ratio in September, because instructions from that process do not apply to the Layer 2 move.

The economics are the harder question. Ethereum Layer 2 networks pay to post data to Ethereum, usually in ETH, and Zilliqa has not said whether institutional fees will be paid in ZIL, whether staking survives, or whether any trading revenue will reach tokenholders. More institutional volume therefore would not automatically raise demand for ZIL. No bank or asset manager has been named as a launch participant, and the project’s website is still recruiting them.

Victims of the Ledger thefts are also still waiting to be compensated. Zilliqa said in September that it would put its compensation proposal to a community vote, and the result will be the first concrete sign of how the team treats existing holders while it rebuilds for institutions. Zilliqa also owes the market an updated roadmap, since its earlier institutional “Mediation Layer” plan set milestones into 2027 without committing to Ethereum settlement.