Polygon Spent $250M on Its ZK Pivot—Now It’s an Abandoned Project Burning Millions Every Year

• Polygon is phasing out its zkEVM initiative by 2026, marking the end of a multi-year, $250 million effort that failed to gain traction.
• Ethereum researcher Lorenz Lehmann reported that the project had been quietly abandoned, before CEO Marc Boiron announced work had stopped over a year ago.
• Going forward, Polygon will concentrate on its PoS chain for real-world asset transactions and AggLayer.

Polygon (POL), one of Ethereum’s (ETH) most prominent scaling solutions, is shutting down its ambitious zero-knowledge initiative.

Once hailed as a significant leap toward scalable, privacy-preserving smart contracts, Polygon’s zkEVM (Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine) will be gradually phased out by 2026.

The decision marks a dramatic pivot for the project—and a possible admission that one of its most expensive bets has failed to deliver.

Polygon zkEVM Shutdown

Originally stemming from Polygon’s $250 million acquisition of Hermez Network in 2021, the zkEVM was rebranded and promoted as the company’s flagship product for zk-rollup scalability.

But despite significant investment and fanfare, the chain never reached full maturity.

According to Ethereum researcher Lorenz Lehmann, Polygon zkEVM was quietly abandoned well before the official announcement.

The chain never received a crucial upgrade to Ethereum’s “blobs,” introduced in EIP-4844, which would have significantly reduced operational costs.

Instead, it continued operating inefficiently and is now reportedly burning over $1 million annually to stay online.

Technical Challenges

CEO Marc Boiron confirmed the decision was “a long time coming” in a blog post last week , stating that the team stopped its work on Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta “a year and a half ago.”

He listed three primary reasons why the initiative fell short:

• Delayed Technical Execution: Support for EIP-4844 took longer than expected. The use of ZK counters created friction for DeFi use cases, and the custom client architecture made debugging difficult for developers.
• Lack of Product-Market Fit: Despite hitting technical milestones, zkEVM failed to deliver a compelling or differentiated user experience.
• Overly Ambitious and Slow to Adapt: The team set aggressive goals but struggled to meet them. As the broader ecosystem shifted toward modular designs, zkEVM lacked the flexibility to keep pace—and Polygon was slow to respond or pivot.

“Shutting down a chain is never an easy decision, and we don’t take it lightly,” Boiron wrote.

“We’ve always aimed to take risks that push the industry forward, but we know that sometimes things don’t work out as planned.”

Why Did Polygon’s ZK Efforts Fail?

The retreat after such a massive investment has raised tough questions about why Polygon’s ZK efforts unraveled.

The lack of support for Ethereum’s latest innovations, poor user adoption, and high operating costs all point to a product that failed to keep up with the rapidly evolving layer-2 landscape.

Intensifying competition in the space has also added pressure—especially as Polygon appeared to overextend itself by trying to compete simultaneously in the PoS, zk-rollup, and aggregator sectors.

Rather than consolidating efforts, the company seemed to spread its resources too thin, ultimately allowing zkEVM to fall by the wayside.

“Suddenly, we have to reimagine everything and go back to the drawing board,” Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon and newly appointed CEO of Polygon Foundation said in an interview with Bloomberg.

A Refocus

Polygon’s new strategy centers on reinforcing its position in real-world financial applications.

The PoS chain, long considered a lower-security but higher-speed sidechain to Ethereum, will now be optimized for stablecoin transactions and tokenized real-world assets.

Nailwal emphasized that AggLayer remains the project’s long-term vision, aiming to unify Ethereum’s fragmented scaling ecosystem.

Polygon’s growth has slowed in recent years, Nailwal admitted.

“From 2021 to 2023, we went from a 10 to a 100 phase,” he said. “Now it feels like we’re back to one to 10.”

Polygon gained significant traction during the 2021 crypto boom, raising over $400 million in a 2022 token sale. But the firm now faces pressure to return to faster growth.

“We need to move fast and make quick decisions,” Nailwal told Bloomberg.