Gaming ecosystem Treasure Chain shuts down mainnet nearly five months after its launch

TreasureDAO will shut down its ZKsync-based Treasure Chain on May 30, nearly five months after announcing urgent cost-cutting measures and securing temporary emergency powers.

TreasureDAO is pulling the plug on Treasure Chain, its own network built on ZKsync’s layer-2 scaling solution, by May 30 after TIP-52 passed, giving the core team emergency powers to handle the shutdown without stopping for more votes.

In an X thread on May 6, the TreasureDAO team urged users to bridge out all their assets as well as non-fungible tokens by the end of May. The wind-down is part of a broader pivot to reduce costs and focus on product development.

“Bridging to Treasure Chain has been discontinued,” the team said, noting that “MAGIC-ETH has been migrated to L1 Ethereum and is now tradable on Uniswap,” while “SMOL-MAGIC liquidity migration to L1 is underway.” Despite shutting down the chain, the team reassured it’s in a strong position to continue its operations as its USDC runway “extended through Fall 2026.”

“Treasure is in a strong position, with our USDC runway extended through Fall 2026 — excluding a recovering MAGIC treasury. The Treasure Chain wind-down will accelerate our product development and reduce operational costs, positioning us for the next stage of growth.”

TreasureDAO

Even with the mainnet shutting down, the team framed the decision not as giving up, but as “a positive move for the org.” The team also added that “retiring the chain is presented as a necessity, not a choice.”

Still, the shutdown comes with hard financial truths. In internal updates, co-founder John Patten pointed out the DAO’s burn rate had become unsustainable, with its runway potentially drying up by late 2025. Keeping Treasure Chain running cost about $450,000 a year — money the treasury could no longer justify, especially with ZKsync grants unlocking slowly over time.

To ease the transition, the proposal lets the team manage around 3.18 million MAGIC and 138 ETH in DAO-owned liquidity. As TreasureDAO put it, the shutdown is an “emergency measure reflecting the current extraordinary circumstances, not a permanent change to DAO governance principles.”

Treasure was among early builders on Arbitrum before launching its own chain on ZKsync. At its peak, it even accounted for more than 95% of all gaming and NFT transactions on Arbitrum and has generated over $260 million in marketplace volume since launch, according to data from Nansen.