Blast’s withdrawal deadline passes with about $40 million left in the bridge, but the money can still come out

The Blast withdrawal deadline passed on Monday 26 October 2026 with about $40 million still sitting in the Ethereum layer 2’s official bridge, The Defiant reported. That date ended withdrawals through the normal interface, which also covered balances held in Blast’s mobile web app. It did not end anyone’s claim on the money. The funds are held by contracts on Ethereum that keep working, and Blast has published guides for withdrawing straight through them.

The balance has shrunk since the shutdown was announced. The Defiant put the sum in Blast’s canonical bridge at about $63.5 million on 2 October. TokenPost, in a report timed 10:39 UTC on 26 October, gave $40.41 million at the cutoff, a fall of roughly 36% in 24 days. Neither outlet says which dashboard the figure comes from.

For anyone who still holds ETH, USDB or BLAST on the chain, the change is practical. What used to be a few clicks is now a sequence of transactions on two networks, with a one-day wait in the middle and, for USDB, a separate claim at the end.

Blast said on 2 October that the chain costs more than it earns

Blast announced the wind-down in a post on X on Friday 2 October 2026. The team wrote that it had launched Blast to build “a self-sustaining chain for users and developers” and that “the economics of operating the chain no longer make sense”, because the cost of running the network now exceeds the revenue it brings in. According to Cointelegraph and Crypto Briefing, the team said it saw no credible path to sustainability. It gave no cost or revenue figures.

The same post, as relayed by CoinGape, Cointelegraph and Crypto Briefing, set out the calendar. Users could withdraw through the usual interface until 26 October. Withdrawals would pause for about a week while Blast unwound its positions in Lido, after which the withdrawal delay would drop to 24 hours. After the deadline, assets would stay recoverable, but only through direct calls to the bridge contracts on Ethereum, and the team promised detailed instructions before the interface closed. Crypto Briefing also reported an apology to users and developers.

We found no post from Blast about the deadline itself on 26 October. The news of the day is the passing of that date with a large sum left behind, first reported by The Defiant and then picked up by TokenPost, Phemex and TechFlow.

What the Blast withdrawal deadline closed: the interface, not the bridge

A rollup bridge has two layers. There is the website or app that builds the transactions for you, and there are the contracts on Ethereum that hold the deposits and pay them out. The 26 October date applies to the first layer. In Blast’s announcement, as Crypto Briefing and Cointelegraph relayed it, assets stay recoverable (Cointelegraph’s word is “accessible”) through the contracts after that date.

The contracts were changed in the weeks before the deadline. According to L2BEAT, Blast upgraded its L2OutputOracle on 2 October and replaced its implementation on 14 October so that withdrawals finalize after one day instead of seven. That is the one-day challenge period the new guides refer to.

No source we found says whether Blast will one day stop its sequencer, switch off the chain or disable the contracts, nor when. We also could not confirm the exact hour at which the interface stopped on 26 October. Blast’s documentation still describes a bridge-website route for ordinary wallets such as MetaMask or a hardware wallet (Withdraw to Ethereum), with a History tab where a withdrawal already under way can be picked up again. The blast.io bridge page still loaded at about 12:00 UTC on 26 October, but we did not test whether it accepts new withdrawals after the deadline, and readers should not count on it.

How to withdraw from Blast after the deadline: prove, wait one day, finalize

Blast now publishes its documentation through Metalayer Labs. Three guides cover withdrawals made directly through the contracts: one for ETH, one for USDB and one for the BLAST token. They are written for exchanges and custodians whose funds sit in smart contracts, such as multisigs, but the mechanism applies to any holder: an OP Stack withdrawal with a few Blast-specific changes. A separate guide covers Blast Mobile, whose smart wallet cannot send to Ethereum directly: funds first go to a regular wallet on Blast, and the guide warns never to withdraw to the Blast Mobile address on Ethereum, where they “may be stuck”.

The Ethereum-side steps are not a form you fill in. The prove and finalize calls take a proof built from the Blast transaction hash, and the guides give TypeScript code (with the viem library) to build and send them. Without a developer, or a custodian that does this for you, the route is hard to run alone.

Before starting, the guides list three conditions. You need a little ETH on Blast to pay for the first transaction (two for BLAST, which needs an approval first). You need ETH on Ethereum for the later ones: two transactions for ETH or BLAST, three for USDB. And the receiving address on Ethereum must be one you control that can both receive the asset and send it on; if no contract is deployed yet at that address, whoever deploys there later controls the funds. Blast also tells users to run the whole flow with a small amount first.

Withdrawing ETH in five steps

1. If you hold WETH on Blast, unwrap it to ETH first. The bridge does not take WETH.
2. On Blast, start the withdrawal by calling the L2BlastBridge’s bridgeETHTo function with the amount attached and your Ethereum address as recipient. Keep the transaction hash: every later step is built from it.
3. Wait up to about one hour, until the Blast output that includes your transaction has been posted to Ethereum. Then send proveWithdrawalTransaction to Blast’s OptimismPortal contract on Ethereum.
4. Wait one day for the challenge period.
5. Send finalizeWithdrawalTransaction to the same portal. The ETH is paid to your recipient in that transaction.

Two details in the ETH guide catch people out. Blast’s portal does not use the same finalize function as other OP Stack chains: it takes an extra first value, a hintId read from Blast’s ETH yield contract, and a result of zero means the withdrawal queue has not processed your request yet. The finalize transaction also needs its gas limit set by hand; the guide gives 900,000 for a standard ETH withdrawal (it needs about 725,000) and says too low a limit makes the call revert.

Finalized does not always mean delivered. If the receiving address rejects ETH, the withdrawal is marked as finalized but the funds stay in Blast’s cross-domain messenger contract on Ethereum until someone retries the delivery, which anyone can do. The guide suggests checking that the recipient’s balance actually went up.

The prove and finalize transactions can be sent by any Ethereum account that has ETH for gas, according to the guides. For ETH and BLAST, the original holder only has to act on Blast, at the start.

USDB comes back as DAI, after an extra claim

USDB, Blast’s yield-bearing dollar token, is backed by DAI held on Ethereum, and it is paid out as DAI. No token approval is needed. The route has one more stage. After starting the withdrawal on Blast with bridgeERC20To, proving it, waiting a day and finalizing it (the guide gives a gas limit of 1,600,000 for that step), you wait up to another day while Blast processes its USD withdrawal queue.

Then the recipient itself must call claimWithdrawal on Blast’s USDYieldManager contract on Ethereum. The DAI is not sent automatically, and the call fails if anyone else sends it. The guide warns that many forwarding or sweeping contracts cannot make that call, which would leave the DAI stuck; it advises withdrawing first to a multisig or an ordinary wallet you control.

BLAST tokens: one wrong address and the tokens are locked for good

BLAST is native to Blast: tokens are locked there while a copy is minted on Ethereum. The withdrawal goes through a different contract from ETH and USDB, the L2StandardBridge. The steps are an approval, the withdrawal, the proof, the one-day wait and the finalize call (gas limit 800,000 in the guide). The guide carries a blunt warning: if the official Ethereum BLAST contract is not entered as the destination token, the BLAST is locked permanently, because the Blast-side bridge accepts any address and the withdrawal then fails on Ethereum.

Timing, costs and fake recovery sites

On the guides’ own numbers, the shortest realistic exit takes about one hour plus one day for ETH and BLAST, and up to one more day for USDB. Gas has to be paid on both networks, so a holder with no ETH on Blast must first get a small amount there.

Do not take contract addresses from social media, search ads or a site that offers to “recover” Blast funds for you. Check every address against Blast’s own documentation and on Etherscan before signing. Cryptoticker warned on 3 October that shutdowns like this attract fake “Blast recovery” sites and phishing links; we found no report of such an incident so far, but the pattern is familiar from fake claim sites and poisoned addresses in airdrop scams. Nobody needs your seed phrase or private key to help you withdraw.

How much is left in Blast: $40 million secured, about $30 million in the canonical bridge

The “about $40 million” figure is close to what L2BEAT calls total value secured, though no outlet says that is where it comes from. On the Blast page we read on 26 October (the page gives no snapshot time), L2BEAT showed $39.92 million, down 21.8% in seven days. Of that, $29.97 million was canonically bridged, meaning deposited through Blast’s own Ethereum contracts, $9.68 million was externally bridged through other bridges, and $0.26 million was minted natively on Blast.

The split matters. The prove-and-finalize route described above applies to assets in Blast’s canonical bridge. Tokens that arrived through a third-party bridge go back through that bridge, under its own rules, and the Blast guides do not cover them. The Defiant described its 2 October figure of $63.5 million as the canonical-bridge balance, while L2BEAT’s canonical figure today is about $30 million; none of the sources explains how the numbers fit together. By asset type, L2BEAT counted $30.34 million in ETH and ETH derivatives (76.0%) and $8.90 million in stablecoins (22.2%).

DefiLlama measures something else: the staking or liquidity, measured at current market prices. It is the main size metric in DeFi.">value locked in DeFi applications running on Blast, not the bridge balance. Its API showed $7.44 million on 26 October (read at 11:56 UTC), against a peak of $2.259 billion on 6 June 2024. The two series should not be mixed.

We do not know how many addresses still hold funds on Blast, or how large the remaining balances are. A few large holders and thousands of small ones would lead to very different outcomes. For a small balance, two Ethereum transactions can cost a meaningful share of the amount; no source has published an estimate.

Blast’s own token has lost almost all its value. CoinGape put its market value near $29 million on 2 October, about 98.6% below its June 2024 peak; Crypto Briefing gave about $30 million. We took no price today.

From $2 billion of deposits to a wind-down in under three years

Blast was founded by Tieshun Roquerre, known as Pacman, who also created the NFT marketplace Blur. It was unveiled in November 2023 with a pitch its documentation still calls unique among layer 2s: deposits earned yield by default, ETH through Lido staking and stablecoins through USDB, whose yield came from MakerDAO’s on-chain T-bill protocol and which is redeemed as DAI when bridged back. A points programme tied to a future airdrop drew deposits before the network even existed, and money could not leave until the mainnet launched.

Deposits crossed $2 billion before launch, The Block reported on 27 February 2024. The mainnet went live on 29 February 2024. In June 2024 the BLAST token arrived with an airdrop of 17% of the supply; Decrypt valued the share set aside for users at about $354 million at launch prices and reported that many of them were unhappy with what they received. DefiLlama’s series puts the chain’s DeFi value at its highest, $2.259 billion, on 6 June 2024.

The decline started soon after. The DefiLlama figures below are month-start values.

Cointelegraph links the slide to the wider downturn in the NFT market, which also hit Blur: its TVL went from above $200 million at its early-2024 peak to about $27 million, according to DefiLlama data cited by Cointelegraph. That reading belongs to the outlet, not to Blast, which gave only the cost argument.

Why a rollup with no revenue has to stop

A layer 2 earns mainly from the fees users pay on it, and pays to post its data and results to Ethereum and to run its infrastructure. When activity falls by 99%, as Blast’s DeFi value has, fees fall with it while many of the costs do not. Blast did not publish its numbers, so the size of the gap is unknown. Our explainer on the difference between a layer 1 and a layer 2 covers how rollups settle on Ethereum.

L2BEAT never rated Blast highly on security. It lists the chain under “Others” rather than as a full rollup, because its proof system “isn’t fully functional”; a single proposer address posts the state roots, and the contracts are upgraded by 3-of-5 multisigs. Compare that with the governance and security council set-up described in our Arbitrum project page. For holders, the exit depends on the contracts behaving as documented and on the team keeping the chain’s outputs flowing to Ethereum.

What to watch next

Will Blast publish a further notice now that the interface date has passed? Will it say when, if ever, it stops posting outputs to Ethereum, which the proof step relies on? And how fast will the roughly $30 million that L2BEAT counts in the canonical bridge drain? L2BEAT’s daily figures are the easiest way to follow that last one.

For holders, the steps are the same today as they will be next week: prove on Ethereum, wait a day, finalize, and claim the DAI if you held USDB. Nothing in Blast’s announcement or guides sets a final date for that route.