Sablier Labs co-founder and CEO Paul Razvan Berg said in a blog post dated July 13 that he has halted development of the token streaming protocol, but that it will remain in maintenance mode until June 2028. All existing flows continue to work, and their core contracts are now available as open source.
This decision marks the end of almost four years of intense work at Sablier. The company was the first to introduce on-chain money streaming, a method of transferring tokens continuously over a predetermined period of time rather than making large payments all at once.
Berg was very candid in explaining the closure, saying that after a difficult first quarter, he could no longer envision a “credible path to becoming the venture-scale independent business” Sablier was trying to build.
What has changed and what has stayed the same?
For users with active streams or vesting schedules, the immediate impact is negligible. All smart contracts used in this protocol are permissionless and non-custodial, so their tokens are safe from Sablier Labs’ decisions. This means that even if a company stops developing a project, streams, vesting plans, and airdrop requests continue to work on-chain. Berg also assured customers that they do not have to let go of their positions just because Sablier Labs goes into maintenance mode.
The most important changes concern future uses of the official platform, not existing ones. As of July 13th, the Sablier interface will no longer allow the creation of vesting streams or airdrops beyond June 2028 and has completely stopped supporting unlimited payment streams.
Sablier Labs also reiterated that it will not be launching new products or expanding to new blockchain networks. The company is focused on maintaining the interface and backend infrastructure until June 2028, which will allow all current users to continue using the protocol seamlessly.
Berg said that once this maintenance period is complete, he envisions responsibility for the project shifting into the hands of the broader community, perhaps through a hosted open source version of the protocol. He made it clear that Sablier should not be expected to cease operations until June 2028. This is considered the moment the company-funded maintenance ends, but it does not mean that the protocol cannot continue to function independently.
An important additional development relates to the licensing of Sablier software. Initially, the protocol’s main EVM smart contract was licensed under the Business Source License (BSL) 1.1 and scheduled for release on July 1, 2029 under the GNU General Public License (GPL). However, as a result of Berg’s previous decision, this process was accelerated to July 13, 2026.
This gave developers the right to immediately fork, modify, and redeploy smart contracts, which was originally supposed to wait until 2029. Cryptocurrency publication Bankless noted that the early license switch was a “parting gift” to the project’s community.
Reasons for the company’s withdrawal
Berg said the first quarter of 2026 was tough for Sablier, citing the fact that the company’s usage and revenue declined significantly, even though the company delivered more features than any previous quarter. He cited two reasons for the decline. One reason is that the client postponed the launch of the token due to the decline in the cryptocurrency market. And with the advent of AI-assisted coding technology, Sablier’s services can now be easily replicated.
Sablier’s more ambitious vision also did not materialize as expected. At the start of the project in 2019, the company believed that more and more financial operations would move online, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) would become sufficiently popular, and token streams would become a common payment method. From one point of view, such predictions turned out to be correct, but they did not reach the level required to sustain Sablier’s business model.
Berg acknowledged that great strides have been made by the crypto sector in various areas. The greatest demand for cryptocurrencies is not related to payment facilitation, but speculative trading and prediction markets, as well as decentralized lending and many other financial services. In his view, token streaming was seen as a feature of other crypto solutions rather than creating a new niche in the market.
Other initiatives undertaken by the company, such as Sablier Mainnet, a customized version of the EVM rollup, the use of NFTs as a source of collateral, and AI instruments, also failed to make an impact.
The company had begun withdrawing from Solana. On June 2, Sablier announced that its Solana application will continue to operate as an interface for billing without a complete shutdown. Although the front end has been scaled back, the underlying programmatic technology deployed on the blockchain remains active, so existing users will still be able to claim their tokens.
What Sablier left behind
According to Sablier’s own statistics, the company processed activity from over 345,000 Ethereum addresses across over 837,000 transactions and disbursed over 547,000 vesting plans, claims from airdrops, and payment sequences. The company offers services on over 30 EVM chains and Solana, and its founders are the creators of ERC-1620, a money streaming standard introduced in 2018.
Berg expressed that he is proud of the achievements related to the fact that throughout the years of contracts in which it manages users’ funds, there has never been a single security incident.
The next thing to consider is a stewardship plan. According to Berg’s statement, Sablier plans to release details regarding the hosting and handover to the community before the June 2028 deadline. Users with streaming accounts for longer than June 2028 are at the greatest risk, as disbanding teams can introduce unexpected bugs.
