Running your own blockchain used to be the point. Nine years ago, launching an independent Layer 1 meant controlling your own consensus, your own validators and your own destiny. This week, three more projects decided that destiny is too expensive to run alone.
Zilliqa is the latest to make the call. On November 4–5, the project announced it will abandon its standalone Layer 1 after nine years and rebuild as the Zilliqa Institutional Layer — an Ethereum Layer 2 aimed at regulated institutions. The announcement was blunt: “For nine years we built and ran our own Layer 1. It hasn’t worked. Usage never reached what a standalone chain needs. Funding and liquidity for standalone L1s dried up.”
The new network will settle on Ethereum and only let verified institutions transact at launch, using verifiable Legal Entity Identifiers checked through the Liechtenstein Trust Integrity Network, which will also run the sequencer. The ZIL token stays, holders do not need to act yet, and no launch date has been published. The decision follows weak adoption and an October exploit of Zilliqa’s X-Bridge that reportedly cost about $800,000.
Gnosis is next, Ronin already went
Gnosis Chain is on the same path, on a longer timetable. In a November 4 post, Gnosis said the chain will stop operating as an independent Layer 1 in spring 2027 and become a zone of the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ), settling to Ethereum. Its Rollup X test network, launched at Devcon in Mumbai on November 4, already demonstrated a swap filled against Ethereum mainnet liquidity inside a single transaction. The roughly 200,000-strong validator set will retire, staked GNO will unlock, and xDAI stays as the gas token while contracts, balances and addresses carry over through a hard fork. GnosisDAO approved the direction in August, and Gnosis says running the chain as an independent L1 costs the DAO $7–10 million a year.
Ronin already finished the move. The gaming chain, once Axie Infinity’s standalone sidechain, completed its migration to an Ethereum Layer 2 built on the OP Stack on May 12–13, 2026, after about ten hours of planned downtime. The switch also slashed RON’s annual inflation from over 20% to under 1%, cutting yearly issuance from 45 million to 5 million tokens.
Why the math stopped working
The pattern behind all three moves is the same: a standalone chain has to pay for execution, consensus, data availability, settlement and the token incentives that secure it. Bitwise senior research analyst Max Shannon told Cointelegraph Magazine that only the ten largest projects are financially sustainable — Coinbase’s and Robinhood’s L2 networks generated $48 million and $52 million in fees respectively over the last year, with margins above 90%, while from 11th place onward, chains collectively generated less than $1 million a year in fees. Ethereum is often criticized for giving away revenue to its L2s, but that is exactly what makes it attractive to build on.
Becoming an Ethereum L2 is no guarantee of profitability, though. Shannon pointed to Optimism, Katana and Linea as networks whose expenses still outweigh their fee revenue, and Blast has already shut down. And the consolidation is not total: Circle’s Arc, Stripe’s Tempo and Hyperliquid’s purpose-built chain show that some large players still choose to build independent L1s.
The Bit Take: The alt-L1 era is not ending with a crash — it is ending with a spreadsheet. When securing your own chain costs more than the network earns, Ethereum’s security and liquidity start looking like a bargain. The interesting question now is not who leaves, but who can afford to stay.
Sources: Cointelegraph Magazine, “Are Alt-L1s over? Security, costs drive smaller chains to Ethereum” (2026-11-12); Crypto Briefing, “Zilliqa pivots to Ethereum Layer 2 for regulated institutions” (2026-11-05); Gnosis, “Building One Ethereum at Gnosis Chain” (2026-11-04); Gate Blog, “Ronin Migrates to OP Stack” (2026-05-12).
