Where are the Interop Fees? Broken Promises, TPP-18 Dilution, and the Gutting of ZIP-16

[Anwar]

The original ZIP-16 (v31) was presented as the Interop Bundles Upgrade. It included interoperability fees and a path toward giving the ZK token meaningful utility—something the community has been promised since November 2025.

Now, those provisions have disappeared.

The interoperability fee mechanism is gone. The token utility is gone. The proposal has fundamentally changed.

Meanwhile, holders were being asked to support TPP-18, which allocates 67 million tokens per month to Matter Labs, while the long-promised utility that many believed would benefit token holders has seemingly been pushed aside.

Voters were explicitly promised by @Golem in the TPP-18 thread that the interoperability fees of v31 would be passed before the first minting occurred, specifically so the token wouldn’t suffer so heavily from this massive dilution. Yet, TPP-18 was passed at light speed, while the June 24th date originally planned for v31 was completely missed by the team without any clarification—and now we get this rescoped version?!!!

This isn’t a minor edit. It’s a complete change in direction.

Holders deserve answers:

*Why were the economic features removed from ZIP-16?

• Who made that decision?
  *When was the community consulted?
  *Is token utility still coming, or has it effectively been abandoned? IT IS UNFORTUNATELY CRYSTAL CLEAR but we NEED CLEAR ANSWERS
  *If it’s delayed, why wasn’t that communicated clearly?

Many people bought into the vision that the ZK token would gain real utility. If that vision has changed, the team should say so openly instead of quietly rewriting the proposal.

Transparency isn’t optional when you’re asking a community to trust your governance process. The community deserves a clear explanation -not silence.

This version is pointed and critical while framing disputed points as questions or observations rather than asserting intentional deception as fact. That generally makes the argument more persuasive and less vulnerable to being dismissed.
@Alex-Gluchowski

[KryptoRitter]

@Alex-Gluchowski I honestly feel betrayed. I’m genuinely shocked and deeply disappointed. I first saw people talking about this on X and assumed it was misinformation or FUD. Then I came to the forum and realized the proposal had indeed changed in a way I never expected.

ZIP-16 v31 was presented as the Interop Bundles Upgrade. The community was told to expect interoperability fees and meaningful ZK token utility. Many of us supported the vision based on that.

Then the deadline passed. No explanation.

Sadly it is true, TPP-18 was rushed through, granting Matter Labs 67 million ZK per month. We were told the interoperability fees would be in place before the first minting to help offset the dilution. That never happened.

Now the proposal has been stripped of the very economic features that made it important in the first place.

From where I stand, the community was asked to vote based on one vision, only to be shown a completely different one afterward. That has severely damaged my trust in both the governance process and Matter Labs.

Given how this has unfolded, it’s not surprising that some people are now calling the project a scam. The only way to restore confidence is with transparency and accountability.

We deserve CLEAR EXPLANATION.

[Golem]

Hi there, I’ll answer the questions raised here directly. First, a correction of the record, because you’re saying that I said something I did not say.

On what I said in the TPP-18 thread:

The claim above: “Voters were explicitly promised by @Golem in the TPP-18 thread that the interoperability fees of v31 would be passed before the first minting occurred, specifically so the token wouldn’t suffer so heavily from this massive dilution.”

What I actually wrote, verbatim [TPP-18 thread reply]:

“A fair point on sequencing. v31 (the ZIP-16 Interop Bundles Upgrade) is currently in its final testing phase. It is expected to be published onchain by mid-June. Once published, the upgrade will go to a governance vote, and upon passage executed. The target for production execution is the end of Q2 2026, ahead of the first monthly capped minter, which activates July 1, 2026. The sequencing is therefore aligned so that v31 is expected to ship ahead of the first minter activation.”

That is a description of the expected timeline as of that date. It contains no promise that interop fees would pass before minting, and it says nothing about dilution. The full exchange is linked above.

Two things from that statement did not hold: v31 did not ship on the timeline I described, which was a target date, and its scope changed. Both are documented in the rescoped proposal [rescoped v31 proposal] and the deprecation notice on the original post [deprecation notice].

Why were the economic features removed?

Because the interop they run on was deferred. Over recent months the team worked directly with the institutions building on ZKsync, and their requirements were consistent: private execution, settlement direct to Ethereum, and atomic interop between their own environments, rather than public interop routed through Gateway. v31 was rescoped to the foundation that path depends on. The Gateway interop code, including the fee mechanics, is complete, audited, and remains in the codebase, inactive. It could be brought into production through a future governance proposal and any implementation steps required at that time.

Who made that decision?

Matter Labs, as the proposal author, based on that partner work. Scoping a release sits with the proposal author. Adopting it sits with governance.

When was the community consulted?

The consultation is the governance vote, and it has not been skipped. It has not happened yet. The rescoped proposal is live now for review, and nothing in v31 executes without passing that vote. If delegates disagree with the rescope, the vote is the mechanism.

Is token utility still coming, or has it been abandoned?

No decision to abandon anything has been made. ZK is the network’s native and governance asset. The fee mechanics exist in the codebase and are inactive. Whether and when any fee mechanism activates is a governance decision, not a team announcement. I will not make forward promises about token outcomes in a forum reply. Those decisions run through governance, where every holder can participate.

If it was delayed, why wasn’t that communicated clearly?

The original post carried the explicit caveat that the date could move, and it did. The scope change should have reached this forum faster than it did. It is now fully documented in the rescoped proposal and the deprecation notice, published in the open as a new proposal rather than a quiet edit, and the proposal thread will be updated as submission and vote dates are confirmed.

Further questions on the release itself belong on the rescoped proposal thread [v31 thread], and I will answer them there.

[Anwar]

@Golem
This response is a masterclass in rewriting history through semantics. Let’s strip away the corporate damage control and look at the actual facts, timelines, and the exact commitments made to this community.

1. The “v31 Means Interop Fees” Fact
   You claim it “misrepresents” your words to say fees were expected before the TPP-18 minting. Let’s be entirely real: In June, when you were pushing to allocate 67 million ZK to Matter Labs, v31 was literally named “Interop Bundles.” The entire core value proposition of v31 presented to the community at that time was the introduction of the interop fee mechanics.

By assuring the community in the TPP-18 thread that v31 would ship ahead of the first minter activation, you were directly using the promise of upcoming token utility (fees) to soften the blow of a massive token dilution. Now that the scope has been completely gutted, you are trying to separate the two as if v31 was always just a random version number detached from its actual features. It wasn’t.

2. Paid “Community Activation” Hyping the Interop Narrative
   If the team was secretly shifting directions “over recent months,” why were your official, treasury-funded arms under the so called “Community Activation ProgramS” (ZKnomist, Madmaxx, Zaksan, walker, etc…and associated content campaigns) aggressively pushing the interop narrative on social media until the very last moment?

While the team was behind closed doors completely changing the architecture for private institutions, paid contributors were out on X and Discord hyping up how “trillions of institutional bank dollars” would route through the token via interop fees. If a pivot was happening, why was public treasury funding being spent to actively mislead the community with bait narratives about token utility that you knew you were removing?

3. The Months-Long Silence vs. The “Sudden” Rescoping
   You admit in your own post that “over recent months the team worked directly with the institutions” to pivot away from public interop routed through the Gateway. If this institutional pivot has been happening for months, why was the community kept completely in the dark until the eleventh hour?

You had months to notify the community that the promised token utility was being stripped from the upcoming release. Instead, you let the community get fed hype tweets, only to hit them with a “deprecation notice” at the finish line.

4. “Inactive Code” is Not Token Utility
   Claiming that the fee mechanics are “complete, audited, and remain in the codebase, inactive” is a blatant twisting of words. Inactive code sitting dead in a repository does absolutely nothing for the ZK token or its holders. Presenting a gutted v31 with no roadmap, no timeline, and no promise of when or if these fee mechanisms will ever be activated is, for all practical purposes, canceling them for the foreseeable future.

5. Shifting the Blame to Governance
   Hiding behind the shield of “governance” to excuse a fundamental failure in product delivery is a recurring, bad-faith pattern. Yes, the community votes on what ships. But the team controls the pipeline, the timelines, the institutional pivots, and the narrative. When the team secretly spends months redesigning the protocol’s architecture for private institutions at the expense of public token utility, and then dumps a stripped-down proposal on the forum, that isn’t “respecting governance”—that is cornering the community into voting on a compromised product because the timeline slipped.

Stop hiding behind semantic technicalities. The community supported TPP-18 on the explicit premise of the network value and utility that June’s version of v31 represented. Delivering a gutted version months late, while institutional pivots were hidden from public view and counter-hyped by paid campaigns, is a total breach of trust.
This isn’t a minor slip in a timeline; it is a fundamental breach of trust. If we let Matter Labs dilute our holdings based on promises they secretly spent months dismantling, we are complicit in the destruction of this network’s integrity.
To every holder and delegate who cares about the future of this project: we must vote NO on this rescoped proposal.
Let’s show the team that governance isn’t a corporate theater where they get to hide their failures and institutional pivots behind a rubber-stamp vote.