Ethereum bridge users have 24 hours to exit before chain shuts down after just 5 week warning

Powerloom, a blockchain network built for decentralized data infrastructure, is scheduled to halt permanently at 6:00 AM UTC on July 21. Users with POWER or other transferable assets still held on the network have under 24 hours to move them to Ethereum as of press time.

Currently, Powerloom's official wind-down page lists the bridge as active. The project's final reminder directed users to initiate a withdrawal through the official bridge and complete the claim on Ethereum before the cutoff.

The bridge only covers balances already available for transfer on Powerloom. Reward claims, unstaking, and node burns closed when mint.powerloom.network went offline at 6:00 AM UTC on July 16.

Powerloom says unclaimed rewards, staked POWER, or node-slot funds that still depended on those dashboard workflows can no longer be recovered. The remaining eligible group is holders with liquid on-chain balances; users waiting on claims or unstaking have no recovery path.

What disappears after the deadline

Powerloom says the chain will stop producing blocks at shutdown. Contracts and state on the network will become inaccessible, and the Arbitrum-based bridge will stop functioning because it will no longer have an operating source chain to connect to.

That dependency is the wider risk behind the deadline. A bridge works only while both sides of a transfer remain available. When one underlying chain is retired, the exit route can vanish even though the destination network continues operating. In Powerloom's case, balances left behind can become stranded with the chain's inaccessible state.

Ethereum-held POWER remains separate from the shutdown. Powerloom says its ERC-20 contract at 0x429F0d8233e517f9acf6F0C8293BF35804063a83 is immutable and will remain accessible on-chain. The deadline applies to assets and application state left on Powerloom, including balances that are not bridged in time. The POWER contract already deployed on the Ethereum network sits outside that deadline.

In a June 15 wind-down announcement, Powerloom's founders said they had concluded that the project lacked a sustainable operating model, continued ecosystem demand, and sufficient resources to support the network over the long term.

The founders stated,

“After a hard review of Powerloom’s path forward, I and Swaroop have decided to wind down Powerloom.

This is not the outcome we wanted. Powerloom began with a clear belief: that onchain applications should have access to reliable, verifiable, decentralized data infrastructure. Over the years, the team and community helped bring that vision through multiple phases—testnet, mainnet, snapshotter participation, data markets, validator infrastructure, and developer-facing products.

It is a bittersweet goodbye for both of us founders, and hopefully for some of the friends we made along the way. “

Before the wind-down, Powerloom had launched its decentralized sequencer-validator network and BDS data market, alongside snapshotter, validator, and developer-facing infrastructure.

Affected users now face a fixed deadline: move transferable assets to Ethereum and finish the claim before 6:00 AM UTC on July 21, or lose access when the Powerloom chain and its bridge stop.

The post Ethereum bridge users have 24 hours to exit before chain shuts down after just 5 week warning appeared first on CryptoSlate.