Paul Razvan Berg, co-founder and CEO of Sablier Labs, mentioned in a blog post on July 13 that they have halted development of their token flow protocol, though it will be kept in maintenance mode until June 2028. All existing flows will continue to work, and their underlying contracts are now available as open source.
This decision marks the end of nearly four years of intense work at Sablier. It was the company The first to introduce cross-chain funds flowwhich is a method of transferring tokens continuously over a pre-determined period rather than in one large payment.
Berg explained the closure quite frankly by saying that after a difficult first quarter, he could no longer envision “a credible path to becoming an independent company at the enterprise scale” that Sablier set out to build.
What changes, and what does not change
For users with active flows or accrual schedules, the immediate consequences are negligible. Their tokens are safe from Sablier Labs decision since all smart contracts used by the protocol are permissionless and non-custodial. This means that flows, entitlement plans and airdrop claims continue to run on-chain even if the company stops developing the project. Berg also assured clients that there is no need to exit their positions just because Sablier Labs enters maintenance mode.
The most important amendments relate to future use of the official platform and not to current uses. As of July 13, the Sablier interface can no longer allow the creation of entitlement flows or airdrops after June 2028, and has stopped supporting any open payment flows altogether.
Sablier Labs has also confirmed that there will be no launch of any new products or expansion into new blockchain networks. The company’s focus will be on maintaining the front-end and back-end infrastructure until June 2028, which will enable all existing users to continue using the protocol seamlessly.
Berg noted that once this maintenance period is complete, he envisions responsibility for the project moving into the hands of the broader community, perhaps through a hosted, open-source version of the protocol. He explained that June 2028 should not be considered the time when Sablier will cease operations. It should be considered the moment when the maintenance work funded by the company ends, but this does not mean that the protocol cannot continue to operate independently.
An important additional development concerns the licensing of the Sablier software. Initially, the protocol’s main EVM smart contracts were licensed under Business Source License (BSL) 1.1 It was scheduled to be released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) on July 1, 2029. However, as a result of Berg’s earlier decisions, this process was accelerated to July 13, 2026.
This allowed developers to gain the right to fork, modify, and redeploy smart contracts simultaneously, when they were initially supposed to wait until 2029. Cryptocurrency publication Bankless referred to this early license switch as a “project move.”Parting gift“To the community.
Why is the company declining?
Berg said that the first quarter of 2026 was difficult for Sablier, pointing to the fact that the company’s usage and revenue declined sharply even though the company offered more features than any previous quarter. He gave two reasons for the decline: clients postponed the launch of their tokens due to the decline in the cryptocurrency market; The advent of AI-assisted encryption technology has made it easier to replicate Sablier’s services.
Sablier’s more ambitious vision did not come to fruition as expected either. When launching the project in 2019, the company believed that an increasing number of financial operations would move online, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) would become widespread, and token flows would become a popular method of payment. In some sense, such predictions turned out to be correct, but they never reached the level necessary to support Sablier’s business model.
Berg acknowledged that there has been great progress made by the cryptocurrency sector in various fields. Rather than facilitating payments, the greatest demand for cryptocurrencies has been related to speculative trading and prediction markets as well, but also to decentralized lending and many other financial services. In his view, rather than creating a new market niche, the influx of cryptocurrencies was seen as a feature of other crypto solutions.
Other endeavors by the company such as the Sablier Mainnet, a customized version of the EVM suite, the use of NFTs as a source of collateral, and artificial intelligence tools have also failed to make an impact.
The company had begun to withdraw from Solana. On June 2, Sablier announced that its Solana app would continue to serve as an interface for submitting claims without shutting it down completely. Although the front-end has been reduced in size, the underlying software technology deployed on the blockchain remains active, allowing existing users to continue claiming their tokens.
What Sablier leaves behind
according to Sablier’s own statisticsIt processed activity from over 345,000 Ethereum addresses through over 837,000 transactions and paid over 547,000 entitlement plans and claims from airdrops and payment streams. It has served over 30 EVM chains as well as Solana, and its founder is a book author ERC-1620a funds flow standard introduced in 2018.
Berg expressed pride in the achievement related to the fact that they have not witnessed any security incidents throughout the years of contracts with user funds being managed.
The next thing to consider is a supervision plan. According to Berg’s statement, Sablier will reveal details regarding hosting and delivery to the community before the June 2028 deadline. Users with streaming accounts that have a duration longer than June 2028 bear the maximum risk, since any unexpected bugs will surface once the team disbands.
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