Individuals who own ZRX can vote on protocol changes and stake their tokens to earn liquidity rewards in Ether (ETH).

[2] Will Warren and Amir Bandeali began the development of the project in 2016, and on February 22, 2017, they released a white paper with the following abstract:[3] We describe a protocol that facilitates low friction peer-to-peer exchange of ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.

The protocol is intended to serve as an open standard and common building block, driving interoperability among decentralized applications (dApps) that incorporate exchange functionality.

[6] On June 22, 2020, 0x announced the formation of 0x Labs stating, "As we continue to decentralize control of 0x protocol, the platform will take on an identity of its own and our organization will transition into one of the many productive stakeholders moving the ecosystem forward.

He further explained that the protocol was built as a highly modular, upgradable system that would be improved upon over time, that the governance function would be plugged in once the team was certain the implementation provided the right incentives, and that the code was secure.