Blast to Shut Down Due to Financial Difficulties, Giving Users Until October 26 to Withdraw

Blast (BLAST), an Ethereum layer 2 solution, announced on October 2, 2026, that it will shut down, citing that maintaining the chain costs more than it earns. The decision was made public through a report by Unchained, which stated that the Blast team saw no credible path to making the layer 2 pay. The shutdown notice gives users until October 26 to withdraw their funds through the normal interface.

The chain's assets will be pulled out of Lido, a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, which will cause a week-long pause in withdrawals. After the pause, withdrawals will resume with a 24-hour delay. The Blast team promised instructions before the deadline for users to recover their funds. However, the shutdown notice does not specify what will happen to the BLAST token, which is the governance token of the chain.

The Blast team disclosed $20 million in venture funding on November 20, 2023. Mainnet followed in February 2024, and the BLAST token arrived on June 26, 2024, as the chain's governance token. The tokenomics page puts the total supply at 100 billion BLAST, with half going to the community over three years from the TGE (Token Generation Event).