Silicon Network Shuts Down, Leaving $9.75M in Assets at Risk

As Ethereum's scaling market continues to consolidate around its largest networks, one of the smaller players, Silicon Network, is shutting down. The network, which connected Korean centralized-exchange users with Ethereum's on-chain economy, had been built using Polygon CDK and was closely integrated with Korbit, a major crypto exchange in South Korea. According to L2Beat data, Silicon held around $9.75 million in assets, led by USDC, WBTC, ETH, and USDT.

The network stopped accepting new bridge deposits on September 2nd and has given users until December 31st to withdraw their assets before it shuts down completely. Once terminated, assets that remain on the chain will be unrecoverable, as Silicon described itself as a non-custodial service where custody and withdrawal of assets are managed directly by each user.

The imminent shutdown now turns into an asset-recovery problem for users holding different tokens. Assets originally bridged from Ethereum can return to the mainnet during the withdrawal window, but those issued directly on Silicon face a harder route as they cannot be bridged directly to Ethereum and depend on liquidity remaining inside the network.