Early morning bombshell: zkEVM mainnet just shut down, and the founding team defected.
Polygon co-founder Jordi Baylina dropped a deep-water bomb this morning—leading the original zkEVM core team to establish an independent project Zisk, simultaneously transferring all intellectual property to the Swiss entity SilentSig GmbH.
This operation has directly exposed internal cracks within Polygon: the newly appointed CEO Sandeep Nailwal just announced the gradual phase-out of the zkEVM chain, only to be 'voted with feet' by the technical veterans within the company.
It should be noted that the number of daily active addresses on the Polygon zkEVM chain has fallen below 5,000, with TVL only remaining at $170 million, a situation where it has been overwhelmed by StarkNet and zkSync Era, which has finally pushed the tech faction to the limit.
Technical Defection: Is Low-Latency zkVM the Final Solution?
Zisk clearly bets on two major weapons: open-source architecture + sub-second verification speed, directly targeting the current ZK-Rollup track's biggest pain point—existing solutions generally have verification delays exceeding 3 seconds, making high-frequency strategies such as cross-chain arbitrage impossible.
According to leaked internal testnet data, Zisk's zkVM validator can complete batch proofs of millions of transactions in 0.8 seconds, with gas costs reduced to one-third of Arbitrum Nova.
This operation is equivalent to dropping a 'technical EMP' in the ZK track, forcing StarkWare and Scroll to readjust their roadmaps.
Game of Thrones: The Capital Under Currents Behind Polygon's Civil War
This split was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. On-chain records show that Baylina invested $47 million into Zisk through an offshore fund as early as November 2024, while a16z, Paradigm, and other institutions withdrew over $320 million from the Polygon ecosystem fund in the same period.
What is more intriguing is the timing of the Polygon Foundation's shutdown of the zkEVM mainnet, coinciding with Vitalik's hint at ETH Seoul that '2025 will be the year of Ethereum's ZK transformation.'
Behind this wave of technical alignment is a brutal competition among VCs for the multi-billion dollar ZK infrastructure market.
Retail Survival Manual: Capture Alpha Opportunities from Three Dimensions
Sniping Technical Migration Benefits: Zisk testnet is expected to launch in July, and early participants may receive token airdrops, referencing Scroll testnet interaction addresses that average $1,800 in gains.
Going long on Polygon ecosystem liquidity siphoning: AggLayer cross-chain protocol's TVL surged 62% this week, and the accumulation of MATIC by whale addresses reached a new high for the year, potentially challenging the $1.2 resistance level before the mainnet upgrade at the end of June.
Beware of the reshuffling risks in the ZK track: the delayed listing of zkSync tokens has triggered community FUD, suggesting a short-term avoidance of heavily invested, unlisted ZK projects, shifting focus to compliant stablecoin protocols that have integrated Zisk technology.
Binance Launchpool Mysterious Code Leak
According to on-chain detective monitoring, Binance's cold wallet experienced sudden movement today, with 500,000 BNB transferred into a staking contract labeled 'ZK_Alliance', which is highly similar to the funding flow pattern before the SpaceandTime launch in May 2025.
Combined with the ZK infrastructure valuation framework released by Binance Research last month, Zisk is highly likely to become the next target for Launchpool, with the staking window possibly opening within 48 hours.
Crypto insights, click my avatar to follow me for more information. Enjoy the potential hundred-fold gains in a bull market and daily spot strategy!