ZK blockchain project Hyli is shutting down after two years, with the team citing weak market demand for zero-knowledge technology as the decisive factor. "ZK has not gained the traction we had hoped for," the team said in an announcement posted Wednesday on X, adding that it sees no viable path to launching the network in the current environment.
The post confirmed that Hyli, which raised $3.4 million in funding, had shipped a working full-node client, completing the Autobahn BFT consensus layer and adding support for ZK smart contracts capable of sustaining real user load.
Despite completing core infrastructure, the team concluded that the broader ZK ecosystem had not developed sufficient demand to support a new entrant. All code will remain open-source on the project's GitHub repository.
Modular ZK Execution Architecture
Hyli had built toward a modular ZK execution architecture that could support multiple ZK proof systems simultaneously, letting developers write smart contracts in different proving stacks rather than committing to a single one. The pitch was that application-layer protocols would route execution to Hyli rather than handling ZK proving themselves. The two-year run covered full infrastructure build-out, but the team stopped short of a public mainnet launch.
The closure comes the same day Polychain-backed Bitcoin Layer 2 Botanix announced it would wind down its Spiderchain mainnet by July 9, after concluding that demand for Bitcoin-native DeFi could not sustain the network economically.
The shared pattern: traction in completed builds and processed transactions, but not in the dimension that would have translated into sustainable network activity. For Hyli, that was ZK smart contract demand from developers. For Botanix, it was DeFi usage from Bitcoin holders.
Hyli's team said the open-source release is intended to let other builders continue the work, and noted its engineers are available for hire.