Zilliqa Token Swap: Recovery plans for unswapped ERC-20 interim $ZIL

On 15 February 2020, Zilliqa officially closed its token swap window (a process which facilitated the conversion of ERC-20 interim $ZIL to mainnet $ZIL), thereby fully transitioning into its native platform. It was a milestone, marking the start of a new chapter in our journey and promising further value, utility and adoption of our blockchain and smart contract platform.

We would like to thank the 12+ supporting exchanges such as Binance, KuCoin, OKEx, Huobi, CoinHako, Upbit, Bitthumb among others who -in several cases- facilitated a rolling swap very smoothly for almost one year, each with their own deadlines. Zilliqa led the marketing-communication process, publishing 100+ announcements featuring guidelines and key dates for our investors via social media, community channels and mailing lists. This included daily telegram updates and reminders to almost 30,000 members.

Following the end of the successful swap period, we reported the following:

• ~98.3% of the 12.6 billion tokens were successfully swapped
• 213,272,942.183558446345 ERC-20 interim tokens, accounting for less than 1.02% of the maximum supply of $ZIL (21 billion), remained unswapped and would be frozen

In the three months following the swap, we have been left with the matter of considering what to do with the unswapped tokens, as they were ‘frozen’ accordingly. Many blockchains burn these tokens given that they are already unusable within the Ethereum ecosystem, however, there have been some requests from the community to enable a swap following the initial deadline. As such, and following intensive exploration of the technical and commercial processes required to do this, we’d like to initiate a long-term recovery process that might allow community members who missed the swap, to have a chance in future to exchange their ERC-interim $ZIL when a customised solution can be put in place to make this possible.

Considerations for Community Members Still Holding ERC-20 interim $ZIL

We have thoroughly assessed potential solutions to help all those who missed the swap window so that we can convert their defunct tokens into functional mainnet $ZIL.

However, the frozen token swap process requires coordination with parties other than Zilliqa to provide a solution that could work for all token holders. To this end, we plan to identify a partner such as an exchange (that may require KYC) or a custodial wallet provider to facilitate the swap.

We would emphasise that identifying a partner will be a challenging endeavour particularly given that all existing market players have moved to mainnet $ZIL and have stopped supporting ERC-20 interim $ZIL. Asking them to add support back for ERC-20 interim $ZIL may require infrastructural changes on their side and fresh rounds of discussions that could take some time. As such we’re presently unable to provide a firm timeline at this point. We believe it will take several months and so, we hope to provide you with a progress report by the end of 2020 (Q4). Until then, we request patience.

In the meantime, you can rest assured that we will be sharing any and all pertaining updates via ALL our platforms as always: Telegram, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, Blockfolio, Linkedin, Facebook, WeChat, Zilliqa Mailing List. On your end, it is critical that you sign up/subscribe to one or more of these so that you can get another chance at swapping your tokens, and stay informed.

We thank you for your understanding, patience and constant support.