Sophon's zkSync chain shuts down November 30, with a withdrawal cliff on November 25

Sophon, a chain built on the zkSync ZK Stack, has set November 25 as the last day for users to withdraw assets from its mainnet, with the chain scheduled to shut down November 30, per Crypto Briefing citing the Sophon team. Deposits have already been disabled since June 25.

Independent reporting from The Defiant and earlier migration notes from BitcoinWorld confirm the pivot direction — zkSync chain down, consumer finance apps up on Base — but the specific November 25 / November 30 dates come from the Sophon team's own announcement and are not independently corroborated in the cross-check we ran. Treat the dates as team-attributed until an on-chain signal lands.

What the team is winding down

• A standalone L2 built on the zkSync ZK Stack, with its own validators, sequencer, bridges and RPCs.
• Operating cost cited by the team at ~$3.4 million per year; projected savings from the shutdown at roughly $3 million per year.
• Fundraising to date: between $60 million and $70 million across prior rounds.

Once the chain goes offline, the gas and staking roles tied to the SOPH token on that chain disappear. Users who have not withdrawn by November 25 risk assets being stranded on a chain whose bridges and RPCs are being retired. No migration bridge tool is named in the primary reporting.

What the token keeps

Per the team announcement, the SOPH model shifts under the new structure:

• Supply: 10 billion SOPH, fixed.
• Current reference price band cited by Crypto Briefing: $0.0018–$0.0020, implying a market cap of roughly $9–10 million.
• Under the new model, SOPH is tied to revenue from the team's Base-based products, with a portion of revenue funding buybacks and burns.

Binance separately announced on July 28 that it would end SOPH mainnet support and migrate holders to an ERC-20 1:1 bridge, with the exchange's deposits and withdrawals paused around August 4 per BitcoinWorld's reporting at the time. That migration pre-dated the shutdown announcement by roughly three months.

The successor project

The team is rebuilding on Base, Coinbase's Ethereum L2, as a consumer-finance and AI-app studio. The first product named in the Crypto Briefing article is Pyre, described as a "gamified neofinance app." The Defiant corroborates the Base pivot and app-studio framing (Soph+).

The pivot is unusual in one specific way: Sophon is not merging into another L2 or handing off operation to a successor team — it is retiring a general-purpose chain to focus the surviving team on a smaller set of consumer apps built on an existing L2. The chain was running under a year of mainnet operation before the shutdown call.

What to watch

1. The November 25 withdrawal cliff. Users holding assets on Sophon mainnet have five days between the deadline and the shutdown. Any delays in bridge or RPC availability during that window matter.
2. Confirmation of dates. The specific November 25 / November 30 dates are team-attributed and not independently corroborated. Watch for an on-chain signal (final block, bridge drain) or a second primary source.
3. The SOPH buyback mechanic. The token's new value accrual depends on revenue from products that do not yet exist at scale. Reported buyback and burn volume once Base apps go live is the signal to watch.

Context

Sophon joins a short list of ZK Stack-based chains that have exited standalone operation — a pattern that has run alongside the broader L2 fragmentation debate, where high per-chain fixed costs on sequencer, prover and bridge infrastructure push smaller projects back toward shared general-purpose L2s. The $3.4 million operating-cost figure the team cites is at the low end of the range reported by other standalone ZK rollups, and still above what a focused app can carry on its own revenue.

The Base move puts Sophon's successor products inside the Coinbase ecosystem's app distribution, trading sovereignty over the execution layer for a lower bill and a larger existing user base.