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ZKsync Blog > Why and How We're Sunsetting Z...
Published May 4, 2026
Why and How We're Sunsetting ZKsync Lite
Today, May 4, 2026, block production on ZKsync Lite stops. This post explains why, what principles we held to, and how it works.
TL;DR
Matter Labs operated ZKsync Lite from 2020 until today. Today, we sunset the chain, place the claim contract for remaining balances under Token Assembly governance, and ensure that withdrawals can be executed from L1 independently of Matter Labs. To make the withdrawal process delightful, we’ve built a dedicated UI, published independent withdrawal tools, and committed to sponsoring the first 100,000 withdrawals. All future decisions about the withdrawal mechanism will be up to ZKsync governance.
Why now
ZKsync Lite was one of the first ZK rollups to run in production. We set out to do three things, and we did them:
- Prove ZK rollups work in production. Lite has run live on mainnet for years without losing user funds. The cryptography held, the circuits held, and the operational model worked.
- Onboard real users to L2. Lite served real users at a time when most of the ecosystem was still on testnets. Lite achieved milestones such as scaling Gitcoin Grants, enabling low-cost donations, and serving over 3.5 million addresses.
- Generate operational learnings for what came next. Among the lessons we learned were how to operate an elite Security Council, run complex protocol upgrades in live systems holding hundreds of millions of dollars, and maintain fully open-source software in an extremely adversarial environment. These and other lessons are baked into every deployment we’ve shipped since.
With these goals clearly achieved long ago, Lite’s role has run its course. Lite has been publicly in maintenance mode for years. We then kept the lights on well past the point where that was a sensible cost to give users plenty of time to withdraw on their own terms.
The decision to sunset Lite is not a change in values or a departure from our long-term commitment to Ethereum scaling. Lite fulfilled the mission it was designed for. As the ecosystem evolved, our technology and roadmap evolved with it.
Today, our focus is on the next phase of adoption: building Prividium and the Bank Stack of Ethereum — infrastructure designed to bring banks, payment providers, and global financial institutions onchain with the privacy, compliance, and interoperability they require.
The Principles
These principles shaped our approach in designing the Lite sunset.
Remaining balances belong to their owners. We must provide users with easy withdrawal paths that are independent of us. This means withdrawing from the Ethereum L1 and having the process governed by Token Assembly governance.
Don't leave anyone behind. All balances reflected in the final frozen state will be claimable through an L1 claim process. We have done the work to migrate even the smallest balance.
Delightful, consistent user access. The process is designed with redundant verification steps, published state data, a simple UI, and direct L1 claiming to reduce reliance on any single system or operator.
Give as much time as is reasonable, then commit. Keeping Lite online indefinitely would impose continuing operational and security costs while adding limited user benefit.
The Mechanics
Pre-sunset
The structural work consists of one L1 upgrade that adds the claim contract, freezes deposits, and migrates L2 state to L1. Supporting this upgrade is tooling that make the snapshot reproducible: scripts that extract the files needed to reconstruct the Merkle trees — Poseidon for full equivalence with Lite's internal state, plus a Keccak-rehashed variant for cheaper L1 verification — and validate them against the onchain root before anything is published. The cleaned data is published to IPFS and Cloudflare R2, and a read-only API for the final frozen state stays online for at least one year.
Between the snapshot and claim launch, the Lite Security Council independently recomputes the roots, verifies the claim contract bytecode, and signs off on the upgrade. The 72-hour window exists for them — and for anyone else who wants to do the same work in parallel.
Post-sunset
If you miss the May 4 cutoff, your balance is still yours. Recovery happens through a single claim contract on Ethereum L1 — ZkSyncLiteSunsetClaimDistributorL1.sol.
We’ve built a withdrawal portal to access this contract. The portal looks up your address in the published final state, builds the proof for you, and submits the claim. The tokens are sent to your L1 address. To encourage users to withdraw soon and to smoothen the experience, we are sponsoring the first 100,000 withdrawals.
The data needed to independently verify and reproduce withdrawals is published both on Cloudflare R2 and in IPFS. This data includes the final accounts, balances, and token data used to generate the Merkle roots checked by the claim contract. Anyone can reproduce the tree from the dataset, confirm that the contract's root matches the network's last frozen state, and assemble a claim by hand without going through us. To do this, submit (account_id, token_id, amount) plus a Merkle proof against the published roots. To make this affordable on L1, we publish a Keccak-rehashed tree alongside the original Poseidon tree. See the complete independent withdrawal steps.
Sequence of operations on shutdown day
- May 4
- 08:00 AM UTC, the server stops processing transactions. L1 contracts are upgraded to disable deposits.
- Late morning UTC, state extraction: Final state extracted from the Lite server: accounts, balances, tokens. The files needed to reconstruct the Merkle trees are uploaded to IPFS and Cloudflare R2.
- Midday UTC, consensus check: Two independent machines — one using the IPFS dump, one using the live DB — recompute the root hashes. They must match the value already committed on L1. A mismatch halts the pipeline.
- Midday UTC, governance proposal: A proposal containing root hashes, dataset references, and the claim contract address will be posted.
- Lite Security Council Review Window (May 4 → ~May 7)
- The Security Council members have a ~72-hour window to verify before the claim contract goes live. They are expected to independently recompute the roots, check dataset integrity, and review the contract.
- After Lite Security Council sign-off (expected ~May 7)
- The Security Council review window is expected to conclude. Assuming the verification process completes as expected, the claim contract will be deployed with the verified root hashes and the withdrawal UI will become available. If verification identifies an issue, the launch will pause until the issue is resolved.
Links:
- Withdrawal portal
- ZKsync Lite block explorer
- Read-only API of the final frozen state
- Claim distributor contract source (
ZkSyncLiteSunsetClaimDistributorL1.sol) - For independent verification
- Deployed claim contract on Etherscan
- Cleaned final-state files:
accounts.csv, balances.csv, tokens.csv- IPFS CID
- Cloudflare R2 mirror
- Verifier CLI / tooling repo
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