Good news keeps coming, the token has risen 50% this month, is the revival moment for ZKsync finally here?

Author: Frank, PANews

Since the airdrop, ZKsync has been plagued with bad news, with ecological data plummeting rapidly 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 are reports of a 16% staff layoff.

However, since September, ZKsync has been frequently announcing new developments, such as hiring a chief marketing officer from Solana; launching an on-chain governance system; and welcoming the migration of Treasure DAO. It seems that 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 people. This is the first layoff in the company's six-year history, and Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski clarified that the decision was not due to the company's financial situation, and the next step will involve "strategic hiring."

In fact, after this layoff, ZKsync did experience a change in personnel. On September 11, Matter Labs announced the hiring of Meghan Hughes, former vice president of marketing at the Solana Foundation, as the chief marketing officer. Previously, Meghan Hughes had worked at Google, Facebook, Niantic, and Stripe. Matter Labs revealed to the media that "hiring Hughes is aimed at helping Matter Labs share its story and elevate its narrative."

Two days later, ZKsync announced the launch of an on-chain governance system. This is a governance framework 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 CEO Alex Gluchowski announced this news on Twitter, it sparked considerable discussion within the community. Among them, Solana co-founder Toly questioned the claim that ZKsync's new protocol is "not multi-signature." The discussion between the two remained theoretical and did not extend to other levels. However, such a dialogue still brought some attention to ZKsync.

On September 14, Treasure co-founder Karel Vuong 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 for the team's choice of ZKsync.

On September 23, Aave V3, which had been tested repeatedly for a month, was finally deployed 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 the same 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. A review of the data situation since the airdrop reveals that both TVL, the number of on-chain transactions, and the number of active addresses have been in a downward trend since March. However, in September, ZKsync has seen a noticeable rebound in these metrics.

On March 9 of this year, ZKsync Era's TVL peaked at $188 million, but by August 5, this figure had dropped to $72 million, a decline of over 60%. As of September 29, ZKsync Era's TVL rebounded to $140 million, experiencing a significant recovery.

Daily Trading Volume Increases

A more noticeable change occurred in the daily active user count. On September 9, the number of daily active addresses on ZKsync Era hit a low of only 67,000. However, on September 17 and September 20, the daily active address count 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 transaction count increasing by more than 100% from September 15 to September 20.

Signs of Recovery in Active Users

The growth in these metrics may be attributed to the gaming platform Tevaera within the ecosystem. According to DappRadar data, Tevaera has reached around 150,000 user addresses in the past 30 days, marking a 160% increase. Another metric, the number of contract creations on ZKsync Era, has recently remained low with little change, further indicating that this data growth may stem from a specific application rather than a large influx of new tokens.

Significant Gap with Other L2s, Airdrop Phase Selling Off

In comparison 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 been frequently introducing collaborative projects to increase ecosystem activity,

ZKsync still seems to have a long way to go.

As of September 26, the total number of tokens created within ZKsync's mainnet DEX was 507, with a 24-hour trading volume of less than $10 million. The number of unique traders for the most traded token within 24 hours was only 333, indicating that the on-chain ecosystem activity of ZKsync has not yet truly begun to thrive.

From the market performance of the tokens, 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 total tokens are in circulation. No new unlocks will occur before June 2025. Considering the token airdrop distribution over the past three months, the price rebound of ZK may be somewhat correlated with the end of airdrop selling, along with recent collaborative 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 games like Tevaera to activate more users. If the recovery of blockchain games in the crypto industry replaces MEME coins as the next growth engine, ZKsync's reliance on blockchain games to break through in the L2 space may also be a good choice.