Polygon Labs will shut down its zkEVM Mainnet Beta on July 1, retiring a network it once positioned as the flagship of its Ethereum-scaling ambitions and acquired, through the Hermez merger, for $250 million.
The sunset is the final act of a wind-down first announced in June 2025, which gave the community a full year of notice before the sequencer—the component that orders and processes transactions — goes offline. When it does, the chain stops.
The scale of the reversal is what makes it notable. Polygon acquired Hermez Network in 2021 for a reported $250 million, rebranded it as Polygon zkEVM, and launched the Mainnet Beta in March 2023 with the ambition, in the company’s own words, of building an all-purpose, Ethereum-equivalent rollup for the broader community. Zero-knowledge rollups were then widely seen as the endgame for Ethereum scaling, and Polygon’s zkEVM was one of the most hyped entrants in the race. Three years later, it is being switched off.
Why Polygon pulled the plug
Polygon has been candid about the reasons. In the blog post announcing the decision, CEO Marc Boiron said the team had actually stopped work on the zkEVM Mainnet Beta “a year and a half ago” and laid out three failures. The first was delayed technical execution: support for Ethereum’s EIP-4844 proto-danksharding—the “blobs” upgrade that slashed rollup costs—took too long, and the chain’s specialized architecture, including its use of ZK counters, created friction for DeFi builders and made debugging difficult.
The second was a lack of product-market fit; despite hitting technical milestones, the zkEVM never delivered a differentiated experience that pulled in users. The third was that the team was overly ambitious and too slow to adapt as the broader ecosystem shifted toward modular designs.
The numbers bore that out. The zkEVM’s total value locked peaked near $187 million in March 2024, before sliding well below that, and one researcher noted it was running at an annual operating loss exceeding $1 million while rivals like zkSync, Starknet, and Scroll pulled ahead on liquidity and developer activity. “Shutting down a chain is never an easy decision, and we don’t take it lightly,” Boiron wrote.
The closure is inseparable from a broader strategic reset. Under Sandeep Nailwal, who took over as Polygon Foundation CEO in June 2025, the company has consolidated around two priorities: its Polygon PoS chain, now being retooled for stablecoin payments and tokenized real-world assets with a “gigagas” roadmap targeting 100,000 transactions per second, and AggLayer, its cross-chain settlement layer meant to unify liquidity across blockchains. Polygon says research from the zkEVM lives on inside AggLayer and its Chain Development Kit. The reshuffle also cost it talent: zero-knowledge lead Jordi Baylina departed to spin out an independent project, ZisK.
What users must do before July 1
For anyone still holding assets on the chain, the mechanics matter, and the distinction between two types of funds is critical.
Assets sitting in a personal wallet are the straightforward case. If they are not bridged to Ethereum before July 1, Polygon will take an exit snapshot of remaining on-chain wallet balances and automatically migrate them to Ethereum L1, where they become claimable through a dedicated interface published after the sunset. That claim process runs entirely on Ethereum and requires no interaction with the retired chain. Users who prefer not to wait can bridge now at the AggLayer interface, which Polygon says remains fully operational.
The harder case is DeFi. Funds locked inside decentralized-finance protocols — liquidity pools, lending positions, and the like — cannot be auto-migrated, because Polygon does not own or control those applications. Once the sequencer sunsets and transactions stop processing, those protocols cease functioning, and assets left inside them risk becoming inaccessible.
Polygon has urged users to withdraw from DeFi contracts and bridge out before the deadline and asked protocol teams to unwind positions or provide a withdrawal path. There is also a hard forfeiture clause: any eligible wallet-held assets left unclaimed after December 31, 2027, will be considered abandoned.
Another casualty of the L2 shakeout
Polygon’s zkEVM does not fall in isolation. Its shutdown lands amid a broader contraction across Ethereum’s layer-2 and zero-knowledge landscape, in the same stretch that Loopring, another early ZK pioneer, wound down its own decentralized exchange and among dozens of crypto projects that have shuttered services in 2026 as the market thins out the crowded field of first-generation rollups.
The comparison with Loopring is instructive and, largely, to Polygon’s credit. Where Loopring’s wind-down disabled the trustless self-custody exit that defined it and routed funds through a team-controlled distribution, Polygon gave twelve months of notice, kept its bridge open throughout, and auto-migrates wallet balances to Ethereum without requiring users to act. That is a more responsible exit than the space often sees.
The genuine risks are narrower but real: DeFi users who assume “auto-migrate” covers them could be caught out when it does not, and the 2027 forfeiture puts a clock on everyone else. For a technology once billed as the future of Ethereum scaling, the lesson of the zkEVM’s retirement is a sober one—being early and technically impressive was never the same as being adopted.
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