Blast is shutting down, and if you still have anything sitting on it, the date that matters is Monday, October 26. That is the last day the normal Blast interface will process withdrawals back to Ethereum. Your funds don't vanish after that, but getting them out turns into a manual job of calling Blast's bridge contracts on Ethereum directly, using instructions the team says it will publish before the deadline.
The team announced the wind-down on Friday, October 2, saying the chain now costs more to run than it earns and that it sees no credible path to making it economically sustainable. Decrypt, CryptoBriefing and CryptoSlate all carried the same details from that post: a pause of roughly a week while Blast pulls the network's ETH out of Lido, then withdrawals resume with the delay cut to 24 hours. Rather than repeat the announcement, we pulled the public data on what Blast actually held over its life, because the numbers explain the decision better than any statement could.
Blast from launch to wind-down, in its own data
The table below uses L2Beat's daily "total value secured" series for Blast (everything bridged, minted or held on the chain, in US dollars), plus DefiLlama's narrower DeFi figure and CoinGecko's price history for the BLAST token. We pulled all three on October 5.
| Date | What happened | Value secured (L2Beat) |
|---|---|---|
| Nov 21, 2023 | Deposits open before the chain exists, with yield and points promised | $0 |
| Nov 24, 2023 | Three days in | $302.7M |
| Jan 1, 2024 | Still deposit-only | $1.00B |
| Feb 29, 2024 | Mainnet goes live | $2.09B |
| May 28, 2024 | All-time peak | $3.46B |
| Jun 26, 2024 | BLAST token airdrop and its price peak ($0.0292) | $2.92B |
| Dec 31, 2024 | Six months after the airdrop | $1.17B |
| Jun 30, 2025 | One year after the airdrop | $321M |
| Jun 30, 2026 | Quiet decline | $63.9M |
| Oct 2, 2026 | Shutdown announced | $92.6M |
| Oct 5, 2026 | Today | $27.5M |
A few things stand out. The money arrived before there was anything to use: Blast had about $1 billion parked two months before mainnet, which lines up with Decrypt's count of more than $1.1 billion deposited before launch. The peak came three months after mainnet, and the slide started right around the airdrop. Decrypt notes the June 2024 drop set aside $354 million worth of BLAST for users and left many of them disappointed, and you can see the exits in the data from that point on.
Dollar figures can flatter or punish a chain depending on the ETH price, so we also looked at L2Beat's numbers in ETH terms. Blast secured roughly 885,000 ETH worth of value in early June 2024. Today it is about 10,150 ETH. That works out to a drop of 98.9% (10,150 ÷ 885,000 ≈ 1.1% left), so this was not a price story. People simply took their money elsewhere. DefiLlama's DeFi-only measure tells the same tale, falling from $2.26 billion on June 6, 2024 to $22.9 million now, a 99% decline.
The token did worse. BLAST traded at $0.0292 on airdrop day and sits around $0.000115 today, according to CoinGecko, which is about 99.6% below that peak. It also fell roughly 73% in the past week as the shutdown news landed, leaving the whole token with a market value near $8 million.
The odd jump, and the sudden drop
You may notice that value secured rose from $63.9 million at the end of June to $92.6 million on announcement day. That is mostly ETH climbing from about $1,610 to about $2,700 over the same stretch, not new users showing up.
The bigger move came right after the announcement. L2Beat's canonical bridge figure, the ETH and stablecoins locked in Blast's official bridge on Ethereum, went from about $50 million on October 2 to roughly $6.3 million on October 3. Since user withdrawals are paused during the Lido unwind, our read is that most of that drop reflects Blast pulling its own staked position out of Lido rather than a rush of users getting out. We can't confirm that from the data alone, so treat it as an informed guess and don't take it to mean your balance has already moved.
Blast also isn't alone. Zerion's Zero Network gave users until July 31 to bridge out after about 18 months, and Silicon Network, linked to South Korean exchange Korbit, stopped taking deposits on September 2 with roughly $9.75 million still on the chain and a December 31 withdrawal deadline, per Decrypt citing L2Beat. Blast is by far the biggest of the three, which makes it the clearest test so far of what a tidy layer-2 shutdown looks like.
Your exit window, worked out
If the Lido unwind takes the week Blast estimated, normal withdrawals should reopen around Friday, October 9. With the 24-hour delay, that gives you roughly 16 days to start a withdrawal through the regular interface and still have it finish by October 26. That is plenty of time, but it is less than three weeks, and the last weekend before the cutoff is when interfaces get busy and scammers get loud.
Geeknewz's view: if you have funds on Blast, including anything in the Blast web app (the PWA), withdraw to Ethereum as soon as the pause lifts rather than waiting for the deadline. Use only the official Blast site and channels, and treat anyone offering to "expedite" or "recover" your withdrawal for a fee as a scam. After October 26, wait for Blast's own bridge-contract instructions instead of following a stranger's guide. If you only hold BLAST as a token, the shutdown is already priced in, and nothing in the announcement coverage we read promised holders anything.
The bigger lesson is about incentives. Blast showed that yield and points can pull in billions before a chain even exists, and its data shows that the same money leaves once the rewards are paid out. If the next shiny network pays you mainly to deposit, it's worth asking what will keep the lights on after the airdrop.
Data: L2Beat Blast page (value secured series), DefiLlama Blast chain TVL, and CoinGecko BLAST price history, all pulled Oct 5, 2026. Shutdown details: Decrypt, CryptoSlate, and CryptoBriefing.