From $3.7m a month in fees to about a thousand

Blast is shutting down. "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 Ethereum layer 2 network said in a post on X on Friday. It has asked every user to move their assets back to Ethereum mainnet, including balances held in the Blast web app, and has set a date: until 26 October, withdrawals can be made through Blast's normal interface. After that the assets can still be withdrawn, but only by dealing with Blast's bridge contracts on Ethereum directly. Blast says it will publish instructions for that before the deadline.

Withdrawals will not start straight away. Blast says it will first withdraw its Lido assets, a process it expects to take about a week, and that withdrawals will be unavailable while that happens. When they resume, the waiting period on each withdrawal will be cut to 24 hours.

The figures behind the decision are public. DefiLlama, which tracks blockchain data, puts the value of assets on Blast at a peak of $2.26bn on 6 June 2024. On Sunday it was $22.9m, about 1 per cent of that. DefiLlama's fee series, which counts the gas that users pay to have their transactions processed, shows the same fall more sharply. In June 2024 Blast's users paid $3.66m in fees. In August 2026 they paid $1,061, and in September $2,067. The series has no figures from October 2025 to May 2026, so the decline in between cannot be traced month by month. The months it does cover are enough.

The busiest day in DefiLlama's figures since June came after the announcement. On Friday, when users started heading for the exit, Blast's users paid $1,480 in fees, according to DefiLlama. That one day was more than the network took in fees in the whole of June, July or August.

Blast was built to attract deposits. It went live in November 2023 after a $20m funding round led by Paradigm and Standard Crypto, according to The Block, and it took more than $2bn from nearly 200,000 early-access users before its mainnet opened in February 2024. Its pitch was native yield: ether and stablecoins held on Blast earned returns from ether staking and from protocols holding real-world assets, paid out to users automatically. The deposits were the draw. Fees depend on people using the chain once their money is there.

A layer 2 earns from the gas its users pay and spends on posting its transaction data to Ethereum, on running the sequencer that orders transactions, and on the team. DefiLlama's revenue measure, fees minus the cost of posting data to Ethereum, was $884 for Blast in August. That leaves out the servers and the staff. Blast's statement does not give its costs, only that they are larger than what comes in and that it sees no way to change that.

For anyone with assets on Blast, the practical steps are in the post: wait for the Lido withdrawals to finish, then withdraw to Ethereum before 26 October, while the normal interface still works. The BLAST token fell 17 per cent on Friday, The Block reported, leaving it with a market value of about $23m. That is roughly what is still on the chain.