Hi everyone,
Over the past few weeks, we have seen major announcements around enterprise adoption. Matter Labs open-sourced the prividium-core permissioning engine, the Deutsche Bundesbank became the first central bank to test and run it self-hosted, and ongoing discussions highlight institutional traction across the US, Europe, and Asia.
On the surface, this sounds like massive validation for the ecosystem. But when you look at the underlying token economics, there is an uncomfortable reality that governance needs to address directly.
1. Public Dilution Funding Private Enterprise Under TPP-18, Matter Labs was allocated 12 monthly capped minters of 67 million ZK each—a staggering 804 million ZK total. This was budgeted at an assumed $0.015 reference price, and as the token trades below that, the relative dilution absorbed by token holders is even more severe.
According to TPP-18’s own breakdown, over 55% of this budget goes directly to Prividium engineering, business development, and forward-deployed work. In other words, public $ZK holders are fully underwriting Matter Labs’ enterprise runway.
Yet, where does the enterprise revenue actually go? Matter Labs has made it very clear: while the base permissioning engine is open-source, the commercial admin interfaces, deployment tooling, and managed services remain proprietary. Any commercial contract, onboarding fee, or enterprise licensing goes straight to Matter Labs as a private Delaware company. The development and BD costs are socialized onto the DAO through massive token inflation, while commercial profits remain entirely privatized.
2. The ZIP-16 Reality: Inactive Code Does Not Offset Dilution When TPP-18 was debated, the community was assured that the v31 upgrade (ZIP-16)—originally presented as the Interop Bundles Upgrade—would introduce interop fee mechanics, finally creating meaningful utility and value accrual for the $ZK token.
What actually happened? The interop fee mechanics were stripped from the active rollout. The team’s defense on the forum—that the code is “written, audited, and remains in the codebase, just inactive”—is completely detached from economic reality. Inactive code sitting idle in a repository does zero buybacks, generates zero burn, and provides zero yield.
Furthermore, because Prividium chains operate as private Validiums, their private enterprise activity does not generate standard execution gas on public ZKsync Era. The architecture was tailored so private institutions never have to hold, interact with, or buy $ZK, while public holders absorb 67M tokens of monthly dilution.
3. Time for Governance Alignment (And Utilizing Our Leverage) Treating $ZK holders as an infinite, unaligned liquidity source to subsidize enterprise software development is completely unsustainable.
The community supported this network through brutal market conditions. If Matter Labs wants to continue drawing 67M ZK every month from the DAO, there must be strict, binding alignment:
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A Concrete Commercial Value Framework: If public funds build Prividium, a percentage of enterprise integration revenue or licensing value must programmatically route back to the DAO treasury or $ZK token utility.
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Firm Timeline to Activate Interop Fees: Provide a definitive date for when the shelved fee mechanics in v31 will actually be activated on-chain, rather than left as dead code.
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Exercising Revocation Rights: TPP-18 explicitly gives the Token Assembly the right to revoke future monthly minters at any time. If Matter Labs cannot present a clear mechanism showing how institutional adoption economically accrues to $ZK holders, the DAO should actively vote to revoke the remaining TPP-18 minters.
Enterprise adoption should strengthen the $ZK token, not render it an afterthought.
I’d love to hear honest perspectives from fellow holders and active delegates on how we can enforce real accountability here.