ZARO Timeline

Before the token was deployed, the company structure was put in place.

ZaroVerse Ltd was incorporated on August 1, 2025 in the British Virgin Islands (Company Number 2183451). The parent-company jurisdiction was selected for its well-established legal framework for technology and entertainment businesses, recognized international standing, and a corporate law tradition that supports clear separation between the company as a legal entity and the founder as an individual.

Two operational subsidiaries support the parent company: a United Arab Emirates subsidiary for retail and e-commerce activity, and a Jordan subsidiary positioned for long-term expansion of the ZaroVerse entertainment universe.

The corporate purpose of ZaroVerse Ltd is to build, own, and operate a transmedia entertainment universe. This includes published fiction (the cosmic science-fantasy saga that opens with Book 1: The Yellow Spark), associated lore and reference materials, planned animation and games, merchandise (the ShopZaro brand), a podcast on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music, and a cultural on-chain artifact in the form of the ZARO token. The token is one layer of this universe — its documentation on-chain — not its commercial vehicle.

The founder's background: Shihab Khalil, the founder of ZaroVerse Ltd, is also Founder & CEO of ZagTrader — an institutional fintech platform he founded in 2009, serving 100+ institutions across 25+ regulated markets. ZagTrader and ZaroVerse Ltd are operationally and legally separate: different jurisdiction, different audience, different regulatory posture, different corporate identity. The full bio is at /founder.

On June 30, 2025, ZaroVerse Ltd deployed the ZARO Coin contract on Ethereum mainnet. The launch was structured as a four-step sequence intended to leave no administrative control over the token in the company's hands once complete.

Step 1 — Contract deployment. The token contract was deployed as a minimal-proxy clone of Thirdweb's audited ERC-20 template (the same template OpenZeppelin has audited for general use). Total supply was minted at deployment: 1,000,000,000 ZARO, fixed. No mint function, no pause function, no blacklist, no transfer cooldown, no anti-whale toggles. Eighteen decimals. Zero tax on buys, sells, or transfers.

Contract address:
0xc311FD6DA9686507F33991543d8158EF5FaDd5E7

Step 2 — Liquidity seeded. The company seeded the Uniswap V2 ZARO/WETH pool with 300,000,000 ZARO (30% of total supply) paired against 6 ETH from the company's own funds, borrowed from the founder. The resulting liquidity pair is at:

0x53085839A2Ee860E58108665825Fc7Ef5e061213

The starting per-token price implied by the initial pairing was 0.00000002 ETH per ZARO. This is the public launch price.

Step 3 — Liquidity locked for 255 years. All LP tokens received from seeding the Uniswap pool were transferred to UNCX, a third-party liquidity locking service, and locked for 255 years. The company cannot withdraw the LP, modify the lock duration, or recover the underlying ZARO and ETH from the pool. The lock is enforced by smart contract.

Lock transaction:
0xbb17a0d05a167047fb478c9769badaed00fa40e964a54d2917181420d26f4581

Step 4 — Contract renounced. Ownership of the ZARO contract was transferred to the zero address. After this transaction, no party — including the founder, the company, or any third party — can modify the contract, mint additional tokens, or alter any contract parameter. The contract is mathematically immutable.

Renounce transaction:
0x15e4739956e05a80d03cd258eb6a35d7ace2406b7c49a99bc8aa7f7c8fbb3b8a

After these four steps, the supply was permanently fixed at one billion ZARO. Thirty percent sat in the locked Uniswap pool, providing tradable liquidity that no party could withdraw. The remaining seventy percent — 700,000,000 ZARO — was held in the company's treasury wallet for cross-chain bridge deployment and ecosystem operations.

In July 2025, the founder, Shihab Khalil, purchased 195,000,000 ZARO from the company treasury at the same public launch price as the LP — 0.00000002 ETH per ZARO. He paid 3.9 ETH directly to the company wallet. No tokens were granted, allocated, vested, or discounted. The transaction is verifiable on-chain.

Founder payment to treasury (3.9 ETH):
0x8bfec6c0fa1ebcf416bf1225bc55cef134b3190c38b2c6a79e94b7cb08d26e9d

195M ZARO received from treasury:
0x06a3c67288ef42e28fb4b0b6d7b56e6f80a09889f59e27dd78ecd26480681afd

The founder bought at the same per-token price that anyone using Uniswap could have bought at on June 30. There is no founder allocation, no vesting schedule, and no discount.

Through Q3 and into November 2025, ZARO was extended to two additional chains via Wormhole Token Bridge. Both deployments were configured as maintained bridged representations for cross-chain continuity, holder accessibility, and centralized-exchange listing infrastructure — not as primary trading venues.

BNB Chain (November 2, 2025). ZARO bridged to BNB Smart Chain via Wormhole Token Bridge. The mint authority on the BNB-side contract is the Wormhole Token Bridge itself — not a human key. A PancakeSwap V2 ZARO/WBNB pool is maintained for cross-chain price discovery; it is not promoted as a primary trading venue.

BNB Chain contract:
0xa9D72F6C1490647DF20E8Fad3C136cA6AC42c2fc

Solana (November 9–11, 2025). ZARO bridged to Solana via Wormhole Token Bridge. The mint authority on the Solana side is a Wormhole Program-Derived Address (PDA) — controlled by the bridge program, with no private key existing for it. A Meteora DLMM pool was created; both LP positions are permanently locked (no expiry, no unlock mechanism).

Solana mint:
AbzXS6NfGvCtg5B1rqZ1JSfoDHkwTAeEYJkWkHhCe38W

Both BNB Chain and Solana are 1:1 backed by ZARO locked in Wormhole escrow on Ethereum. The total supply across all chains cannot exceed the original 1,000,000,000 ZARO. No new supply is ever created.

Outside the 300,000,000 ZARO permanently locked in the Uniswap V2 LP, the remaining supply has been deployed across cross-chain bridge LPs (BNB Chain, Solana, Base) and retained in treasury wallets for ongoing ecosystem operations.

Treasury custody is maintained in hardware-wallet cold storage with a multi-wallet structure for defense-in-depth. There are no labelled "founder" or "treasury" wallets in the public docs — the only structural address is the Uniswap V2 pool (locked LP). All other holdings are ordinary market participants.

ZARO does not provide financial rights, revenue share, equity, dividends, redemption rights, governance rights, royalties, or guaranteed utility. ZaroVerse Ltd generates no operational revenue from the token.

In October 2025, ZaroVerse Ltd commissioned an independent legal opinion by Drew Barnholtz, Esq. (US-licensed attorney, Barnholtz Law Firm). The opinion analyzes ZARO under six international regulatory frameworks: BVI Securities and Investment Business Act (SIBA Schedule 3), the US Howey four-prong test, EU MiCA, UK FCA guidance, Singapore SFA, Hong Kong SFO, and FATF guidance.

The opinion concludes that ZARO does not constitute a security or regulated financial instrument under BVI law and aligns with non-security / unregulated-token categories internationally. The short public version is published on GitHub.

Legal opinion (PDF) →

ZARO is independently listed on the principal market-data aggregators. These listings are third-party indexed, with verification processes separate from any project request.

• CoinGecko — Listed on all four chains →
• CoinMarketCap — Listed on all four chains →
• GeckoTerminal — ETH pool →
• TradingView — ZAROWETH symbol →

On May 23, 2026, ZARO was deployed on Base via the OP Stack Standard Bridge (Coinbase / OP Labs) and configured as the primary low-cost trading rail. Base offers gas costs a small fraction of Ethereum mainnet and a USDC pairing for traders who prefer a stable denominator.

10,000,000 ZARO (1% of total supply) was bridged from Ethereum into Base. The Base contract is an OptimismMintableERC20 — a standalone ERC-20 with no upgrade path, no human admin key, and bridge-gated minting. The `mint()` function on Base can only be called by the L2StandardBridge predeploy (Coinbase / OP Labs infrastructure), and only as part of a verified cross-chain transfer from Ethereum L1.

Base contract:
0x1d4CeA73e212829d06B9a774d2e06be9DEe5AAB0

Main bridge transaction (ETH → Base):
0x34974128cfb0465e3454dfa4f7bad4a0e589dff475f400dfb0d5310a0930bb2e

Two pools were deployed on Base. The primary pool is Uniswap v3 ZARO/USDC at the 0.01% fee tier — the active trading rail. A secondary Aerodrome ZARO/WETH pool was deployed as a fallback and its LP tokens were permanently burned to 0x000…dEaD — irrecoverable by any party.

Aerodrome LP burn transaction:
0x2033eda615044458b723fb9b7a2141ddcd6cc60d5bf9c7cde933c8d2e33da332

ZaroVerse Ltd has filed nine USPTO trademark applications covering ZARO (word mark, logo, expanded word mark, and mascot design), ZAROVERSE, MEMEWARS, ZAROVERSE MEMEWARS, ZaroLand, and ARC-7 across classes covering downloadable/virtual goods, apparel, toys, retail services, animation, and theme-park / amusement services. All filings are public on USPTO TESS.

Two US Copyright Office registrations are in place: the ZARO character (visual + narrative) and the ZaroVerse story/lore for Book 1 (The Yellow Spark).

On the publishing side: Chapters 1 and 2 of The Yellow Spark are published live at zaroverse.com. Eleven chapters are planned for Book 1; the cosmic saga opens with three books. The Lore Vault contains 32+ canonical entries across six sections. The Mental Watch podcast is live on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.

As of mid-2026: the contract is immutable, all LP is permanently locked or burned across all chains, treasury custody sits in hardware-wallet cold storage with a multi-wallet structure for defense-in-depth, nine USPTO trademark applications are filed and pending, and the BVI legal opinion is valid and public. Outside the permanently locked LP, all ZARO held by the company or founder was acquired through market-price transactions.

On the universe side: Book 1 continues chapter-by-chapter, the Lore Vault is open and growing, the podcast is live, the MemeWars game concept is trademarked with six arena stages designed, the ShopZaro plushie line is in sampling, and ZaroLand (the physical-destination concept) is in early-stage development.