Overview

ZKsync is an Ethereum layer-2 built by Matter Labs on validity (ZK) proofs. ZKsync Era went live on mainnet in March 2023, and the stack has since generalised into the Elastic Network — a set of ZK-powered chains built with the open-source ZK Stack that settle to the same shared bridge. Its governance sits with ZK Nation, the community of ZK token holders and delegates that controls the protocol contracts.

ZK is a pure governance asset: transaction fees on ZKsync are paid in ETH, so ZK's only protocol role is voting weight over upgrades, the token itself, and governance operations. That separation — a governance token that is not the gas token — puts ZKsync alongside other L2 network DAOs the wiki tracks, such as Arbitrum, the Optimism Collective, Starknet, and GnosisDAO.

The ZK token & distribution

ZK has a fixed supply of 21 billion tokens, with roughly two-thirds (66.7%) earmarked for the community and the remainder split between investors and the Matter Labs team under a one-year lock followed by a linear unlock from June 2025 to June 2028. The token generation event and initial airdrop landed in June 2024.

The community airdrop distributed 3.675 billion ZK (17.5% of supply) across 695,232 wallets, based on a snapshot of ZKsync Era and ZKsync Lite activity taken on 24 March 2024 — about 89% weighted to users who transacted and met an activity threshold, and 11% to ecosystem contributors. Details are set out in Matter Labs' airdrop announcement and reported at the time.

Three-body governance

ZK Nation's defining feature is a three-body structure — a deliberate departure from the single-house token vote used by most protocol DAOs. Each body checks the others (governance 101):

• Token Assembly — ZK holders who delegate voting power to ZKsync addresses. The Assembly submits and votes on proposals to upgrade the protocol, the token, and the governance system itself.
• Security Council — 12 technical experts (auditors, security engineers) who are signers of a security multisig. They review and actively approve protocol upgrades passed by the Token Assembly and, facing an imminent threat, can freeze the protocol and push time-sensitive fixes.
• Guardians — protectors of the ZK Credo, a minimum of 5 of 8 allocated seats, holding veto power to block decisions that clash with the ecosystem's stated values.

Splitting proposing power (Assembly), technical safety (Council), and a values veto (Guardians) is a different answer to the capture and rushed-upgrade risks that a plain token vote carries — closer in spirit to a constitutional separation of powers than to one-token-one-vote.

Onchain governors & proposal types

The three bodies act through three onchain governor contracts on ZKsync Era, each paired with a timelock and each owning one proposal class:

• Protocol Governor executes ZKsync Improvement Proposals (ZIPs) — upgrades to the protocol contracts.
• Token Governor executes Token Program Proposals (TPPs) — proposals that assign minting and burning rights over ZK.
• GovOps Governor facilitates Governance Advisory Proposals (GAPs) — governance and operations decisions.

Standard upgrades follow a set path: Token Assembly approval → Security Council risk review → timelocked execution. Emergency changes route instead through the Emergency Upgrade Board, which accepts approvals from all three governance bodies before an expedited upgrade can execute.

BORGs: smart contracts wrapping legal entities

The Security Council and Guardians are structured as BORGs (blockchain organizations) — legal entities whose behaviour is constrained by onchain rules embedded in their charters, so a multisig cannot simply act outside its mandate. It is the same "cybernetic org" pattern that Safe multisigs and adjacent tooling have popularised, applied here to give a values veto and a security freeze real legal and onchain teeth rather than social convention alone.

How Caper relates

ZKsync's Guardians are a backstop against capture: if a vote drifts from the ecosystem's values, a small values body can veto it. Caper answers the same worry from the opposite direction. Rather than appointing guardians to protect a holder who disagrees, it gives that holder the exit right — the ability to leave on defined terms and reclaim a canonical share of the treasury — so the check on a bad decision is the credible threat of exit, not a standing veto seat. Two honest designs for the same problem: a body that can say no, versus a door that is always open.