Sablier Labs is Entering Maintenance Mode

TL;DR — Sablier Labs has stopped active product development and entered maintenance mode. Existing users will continue to be served through June 2028. The Sablier protocol will continue to run in perpetuity onchain, and the interface will eventually become an open-source public good.

Hey everyone — some hard news.

After nearly four years building Sablier Labs, we've made the difficult decision to stop active development and put the company into maintenance mode until June 2028.

What This Means for Users

Let me start with the part that matters most: your existing streams, vesting plans, and airdrops are not changing.

The Sablier smart contracts are onchain and permissionless. They don't depend on Sablier Labs staying in business, and the company doesn't have custody of your tokens.

You can keep claiming, withdrawing, and managing them through the official interface. There's no need to exit a position early solely because Sablier Labs is entering maintenance mode.

In practice, this is what maintenance mode means:

• Starting today (July 13, 2026), our official Sablier Interface will stop accepting vesting streams and airdrops with an end time later than June 2028, and open-ended payment streams will be fully blocked.
• We won't be building new products or deploying to new chains.
• We will keep the interface and the backend infrastructure reliable for existing users through June 2028.

After that, the protocol and interface will continue operating as usual for existing users. The protocol doesn't need an operator: its contracts will remain deployed for as long as the underlying networks continue to run.

Our expectation is to leave the interface running and move its stewardship to the community, most likely as an open-source public good.

June 2028 marks the end of Sablier Labs' funded maintenance commitment, not the day Sablier disappears. We'll publish the exact stewardship and hosting plan well before then.

What Happened

Q1 2026 was brutal. Usage and revenues dropped sharply — even though, ironically, it was our most productive quarter ever in terms of features shipped.

There are several reasons for that, but two big ones are:

1. Most customers postponed their launches as crypto markets deteriorated.
2. AI-assisted coding has made it much cheaper to replicate Sablier's products.

This downturn forced us to take a hard look at Sablier and accept a difficult truth: there isn't a venture-scale business in onchain token distribution/money streaming. Not at the size we'd need to justify continuing, and not on a timeline we can wait out.

There's real demand for streaming, vesting, and airdrop infrastructure. We see it in the teams that use Sablier and in the amount of value that has moved through the protocol. However, we no longer see a credible path to becoming the venture-scale, independent business we set out to build. The market isn't large enough today, and we don't think it will become large enough soon enough to justify continuing.

Things We Tried

We didn't arrive at this decision lightly or without trying other directions.

Here are some bets we took along the way that didn't pan out:

• Lockup NFTs — using vesting tokens as collateral for taking out onchain loans. There has been some interest in this feature, but it didn't take off as a DeFi primitive.
• Sablier Mainnet — an ambitious project: a custom EVM rollup with native fungible tokens and recurring payments baked into the VM itself, so subscriptions can run between two EOAs without deposits or intermediary contracts. We underestimated how hard it would be to build and overestimated user demand.
• Sablier Bob — we didn't find a market for price-gated lockups.
• AI agent skills — same story, not a big enough market.

Things We're Proud Of

• Hundreds of millions of dollars (or billions, depending on how you measure it) of value processed by our smart contracts
• >345,000 Ethereum addresses that have interacted with Sablier
• >837,000 Ethereum transactions and >547,000 vesting plans, airdrop claims, and payment streams
• Deployed to 30+ EVM chains plus Solana
• Many open-source contributions that the wider Ethereum ecosystem still uses every day — e.g. PRBMath, plus our Foundry templates
• Thousands of teams and DAOs running token distributions through us
• We were the earliest team in Ethereum to treat money streaming as a serious money primitive.

And most importantly: zero security incidents across years of contracts holding user funds. This is the thing we're proudest of.

Making Sablier Fully Open-Source

As Sablier Labs steps back, we want to remove the restrictions that would make it harder for others to carry the work forward.

Until today, the primary EVM smart contracts in the Sablier EVM monorepo were licensed under the BUSL 1.1 (Business Source License). They were scheduled to transition to the GPL (GNU General Public License) on July 1, 2029.

We have brought that date forward to July 13, 2026. We did this by updating the date at license-dates.sablier.eth, using the mechanism described in our BUSL license document. As a result, those contracts are now available under GPL.

The community can now fork, modify, and deploy the contracts without waiting until 2029, subject to the terms of the GPL.

The Team

It was difficult to say goodbye to the team! They are some of the best people I've ever worked with.

Sablier brought together top-notch Solidity engineers, frontend builders, designers, and protocol thinkers. They shipped through bear markets, regulatory uncertainty, and the usual crypto chaos.

Some of them are already figuring out what's next. If you're hiring, talk to them — you'd be lucky to get any of them on your team.

Their handles: @razgraf, @AndreiVladBrg, @sy100x, @IaroslavMazur, @MirceaGavriliu, @tukwanx, @sawinyh.

The Bigger Picture

When we started Sablier, we were betting on a specific version of 2026 — more tokens, more DAOs, equities moving onchain, money streaming as a default money lego. Most of that vision hasn't materialized.

• Capital formation hasn't moved onchain.
• Money streaming turned out to be a feature inside other products.
• AI is eating into SaaS — teams that once paid to use Sablier are now vibe-coding their own distribution software.

More generally, crypto found product-market fit, but mostly in speculation, trading, prediction markets, and decentralized lending. The rich ecosystem of token-native orgs and protocol communities we were building for hasn't materialized at the scale our business needed.

Personally

I don't know exactly what's next for me. I'm going to take a short break, and then return to building. I still believe in crypto.

A big thank you to everyone who used Sablier, ran a token distribution through us, or just believed in the streaming thesis. To the whole team. To our investors and partners. To a16z crypto for taking us in at CSX London 2024.

Sablier Labs didn't become the business we hoped it would, but the Sablier protocol will keep doing what it was designed to do: distribute tokens according to onchain, permissionless rules.

— Paul Razvan Berg, co-founder and CEO

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Originally published as an X Article.