The strangest Meme, can a name change keep up with the privacy narrative?

Written by: Nicky, Foresight News

Traditional privacy coins attempt to tackle the issue of “hiding on the chain,” but rarely address a more practical question: If the essence of currency is a right certificate that can be physically transferred, how does digital currency flow off the chain?

The emergence of ZERA is an attempt to fill this gap. Recently, tokens in the privacy sector have performed strongly, with ZERA having a maximum increase of over 150% this month, and its current market capitalization is approximately 27 million dollars.

ZERA originated from M0N3Y (“Monopoly Money”), a fully community-driven Meme token. The early token design emphasized circulation and community participation, with no VC allocation and 100% circulation. As the team became more clear about their vision for privacy, zero-knowledge (ZK), and digital cash, they aimed to transform the project from a purely speculative community into a long-term operating privacy protocol, while the old token system could not support the new project requirements.

Token migration began on September 25 and ended on October 2. On the last day of migration, M0N3Y's market cap reached 40 million USD, attracting the attention of many investors, but on the same day, the market cap of ZERA, after a successful migration, remained around 25 million USD, with a drop of 37%. Some early investors in the community expressed shock at the significant drop caused by the migration; however, some investors view ZERA as one of the few projects attempting to transition the Meme community towards infrastructure development.

ZERA is launched by Zera Labs, running on Solana, positioned as a zero-knowledge privacy layer, aimed at converting users' existing assets into private, offline transferable digital cash. Unlike traditional privacy coins, ZERA adopts a direct deposit architecture, allowing users to enjoy privacy protection without the need to exchange assets for project tokens.

Users can convert USDC, USDT, SOL, etc. into a “digital note” based on cryptographic commitments, which can be transferred offline and ultimately settled on-chain through zero-knowledge proofs. In other words, it aims to bridge “blockchain transactions” with “real-world delivery,” allowing digital currencies to have the portability of cash while maintaining the trustworthiness of on-chain verification.

ZERA combines cryptographic primitives such as the Poseidon hash function, Groth16 zero-knowledge proofs, and Pedersen commitments. Its core lies in enabling offline peer-to-peer transaction capabilities, allowing value transfers to be completed via NFC, Bluetooth, or QR codes, without the need for an internet connection.

ZERA was initially launched as academic research, with plans to publish in the form of a doctoral thesis. However, community support prompted a shift towards commercial development, gradually transitioning into a corporate operation led by developer Dax. He previously worked at MetaMask and other tech companies including Twitter, with a background in finance and engineering, and he has also caught the attention of Solana co-founder toly. Other team members have limited public information available, but it has been announced through public channels that they are expanding to hire senior engineers to support the subsequent product roadmap.

Unlike many privacy projects, ZERA does not take “regulatory resistance” as its core narrative. Zera Labs is actively working on the policy level, including promoting the “Privacy-First Digital Finance Act” draft in Texas, attempting to establish a legal framework for crypto credentials, selective disclosure, and cryptographic proofs.

In the design of the token economic model, ZERA attempts to directly bind “usage behavior” with “token supply reduction.” When users mint assets into vouchers, they need to consume and destroy a certain proportion of ZERA tokens, while additional collateral may be required to protect the liquidity pool. When liquidity is insufficient or the burning path is restricted, the protocol reserves the mechanism to repurchase tokens from the secondary market for destruction. This model is currently still in the parameter experimentation phase, and the final ratio will be adjusted based on on-chain usage data and governance discussions.

The token M0N3Y was originally launched on the pump.fun platform, with a total supply of 1 billion tokens, all in circulation and with no team or venture capital allocation. In October this year, M0N3Y completed a 1:1 token migration to ZERA. The main reason for the migration was that the old contract structure lacked native support for burning and buyback mechanisms, and could not flexibly adjust the split ratio, verification functions, and multi-asset compatibility, thus limiting the protocol's ability to build supply elasticity in the new phase. The migrated token contract allows a portion of the protocol fees to be used for market buybacks and supports dynamic destruction based on usage, rather than fixed inflation or static distribution.

At the same time, ZERA has gradually shifted from relying on community contributions to supporting research and development through liquidity pool fees, and has migrated the pool from Raydium to Meteora/DAMM v2 to allow fee income to flow back into research and development itself.

In terms of product form, ZERA does not limit itself to being “just a wallet.” The current demo version primarily implements asset conversion, offline transfer, and re-online settlement through the browser. The team plans to gradually launch desktop and mobile versions and explore hardware devices with NFC, placing proof generation and key management on local chips to reduce dependence on centralized clients. The ultimate plan is to release hardware wallet devices to achieve a fully offline “street commerce” scenario.

The long-term vision is to build a complete zero-knowledge privacy stack, providing developers with software development kits and application programming interfaces to extend privacy protection capabilities to wallets, commercial applications, and decentralized finance application scenarios. The project also plans to explore advanced features such as privacy exchanges, over-the-counter trading settlements, and shielded liquidity provisioning.

ZERA originated from Meme, but attempts to break away from the Meme narrative. After the frenzy of M0N3Y, price crashes, community disagreements, and migration turmoil, ZERA chooses to shift its focus from “speculative consensus” to “usability consensus.” This allows “Meme” to be truly utilized, even as a settlement layer in the real world.