Today, October 26, 2026, is the last day to withdraw funds from Blast, the Ethereum layer 2 network, through its regular web interface. From tomorrow, anyone still holding assets on Blast has to deal directly with the network’s bridge contracts on Ethereum mainnet. About 40.4 million USD was still sitting in the Blast bridge as the deadline arrived.
This is the final deadline the team set when it announced the shutdown earlier this month. The team said: “After that date, users will need to interact directly with the bridge contracts on Ethereum.”
What changes for players with assets on Blast
Funds left on Blast are not lost after today. They can still be reached, but getting them out takes more technical steps.
- Withdrawals have to be submitted directly through the bridge contract on Ethereum.
- The process requires submitting a cryptographic proof, followed by a one-day wait before the funds can be claimed.
- Holders of USDB, Blast’s native stablecoin, also need to claim DAI separately as part of the process.
Blast has published a contract-level withdrawal guide for users who missed the regular deadline. That covers anyone with remaining balances, including assets held in the Blast PWA app. The official instructions are on Blast’s own channels, and links shared by third parties call for caution.
Why Blast is shutting down
Blast announced the shutdown on October 2, 2026. The team said that “The ongoing costs of maintaining Blast exceed the revenue generated by the L2” and that it saw “no credible path” to economic sustainability.
“As a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to wind Blast down,” the team wrote.
Activity had fallen a long way. Over a 24-hour period around the announcement, Blast made just 110 USD in chain revenue and 124 USD in chain fees. Total value locked was about 24.7 million USD at the time, down from more than 2.26 billion USD in June 2024.
Right after the announcement, Blast paused user withdrawals for about a week while the team pulled Blast’s assets out of Lido. Once that was done, withdrawals came back with a 24-hour delay, shorter than the usual wait. Users then had until today to move assets back to Ethereum mainnet through the regular interface.
From launch to wind-down
Blast launched in November 2023 after a 20 million USD funding round led by Paradigm and Standard Crypto. It was built by the team behind the NFT marketplace Blur, led by founder Tieshun Roquerre, known as Pacman.
Its draw was native yield. ETH and stablecoins bridged to Blast earned yield automatically through underlying protocols, and reward programs for depositors added more on top. At its peak the network held more than 2 billion USD in deposits.
Once incentives faded, activity moved elsewhere and projects started to leave. Pacmoon, once the largest meme coin on Blast, migrated to Solana in August 2024. Fantasy Top, a trading card game and one of Blast’s best-known apps, shut down earlier this year after its model broke. Its team said it would refund all pre-seed and seed investors and that it had returned about 20 million USD to its community. Fantasy Top generated 7.05 million USD in cumulative fees on Blast.
More closures for games and chains
Blast is one of two shutdowns tied to Pacman this month. On October 12, Blur announced it will close its NFT marketplace frontend on November 12, with its smart contracts still running on Ethereum. Blur’s lending protocol Blend will stop matching new loans on the same date.
Other layer 2 networks are closing too. Abstract, the consumer-focused chain known for onchain games, is set to shut down on December 15, 2026. Several of its games are moving their assets to Ethereum mainnet or other networks before then.
For web3 games, a chain closing means studios have to migrate contracts and assets, and players have to move their tokens and NFTs in time or go through technical recovery steps later. Fantasy Top brought attention and fees to Blast, but its model did not last. With Abstract also closing and fewer active layer 2 networks around, more onchain games are likely to pick networks with clear long-term funding and steady user activity.
The BLAST token
The BLAST token dropped 47% in the 24 hours after the shutdown news and is now about 99% below its peak. Blast’s last phase starts tomorrow, with about 40.4 million USD still waiting to be withdrawn through the bridge contracts.
