Ethereum Layer 2 Blast Is Shutting Down, Saying Costs Now Exceed What the Chain Earns

Blast, the Ethereum layer 2 network created by Blur founder Tieshun “Pacman” Roquerre, is shutting down, its team announced on X on Friday.

“Unfortunately, the economics of operating the chain no longer make sense: the ongoing costs of maintaining Blast exceed the revenue generated by the L2, and we do not see a credible path to making the chain economically sustainable,” the team wrote.

Blast asked all users to move their assets back to Ethereum mainnet, and said that applies to funds sitting in its progressive web app, the Blast PWA, as well.

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To make withdrawals easier, Blast said it will cut its withdrawal delay to 24 hours. As a first step in the shutdown, the team will pull Blast’s assets out of Lido, a process it expects to take about one week. Withdrawals will be unavailable during that time, even once the 24-hour delay is in place, and will then resume on the new schedule.

Users have until Oct. 26 to withdraw through the regular Blast interface. After that date, funds will remain withdrawable, but only by interacting directly with Blast’s bridge contracts on Ethereum. The team said it will publish detailed instructions before the deadline.

Blast’s original pitch was native yield: ether and stablecoins bridged to the network were automatically staked to earn interest that flowed back to users.

The network drew heavy demand before it was fully live. When it opened for deposits in November 2023, with withdrawals disabled, Blast pulled in $300 million within days, backed by a $20 million investment from Paradigm and Standard Crypto. Its mainnet followed in February 2024, and the BLAST token debuted in June 2024 at an initial fully diluted valuation of $2 billion.

On Friday, DeFi apps on Blast held about $32 million in total value locked, according to DefiLlama, down from a peak of roughly $2.26 billion in June 2024. L2Beat counted about $90 million in total value secured on the chain, around $50 million of it bridged in through Blast’s canonical bridge.

BLAST traded near $0.00028 on Friday, down about 32% over 24 hours and roughly 99% below its June 2024 high, according to CoinGecko. Its market cap stood at about $20 million.

“We’re sorry to the users and developers who believed in Blast, built on it, and supported the ecosystem,” the team wrote, adding that its priority is making the shutdown “as smooth and safe as possible.”

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