Paul Razvan Berg, co-founder and CEO of Sablier Labs, mentioned in a blog post dated July 13, that they have halted the development of their token-streaming protocol, although it will be kept in the maintenance mode until June 2028. All the existing flows will keep operating, and their core contracts are now available as open source.
The decision marks the end of almost four years of intense work at Sablier. The company was the first to introduce on-chain money streaming, which is a method of transferring tokens constantly over a predetermined period instead of making one large payment.
Berg explained the closure quite frankly by saying that after a hard first quarter, he is no longer able to imagine “a credible path to becoming the venture-scale, independent business” Sablier set out to build.
What changes, and what does not
For users who have active streams or vesting schedules, the immediate consequences are negligible. Their tokens are safe from Sablier Labs’ decision since all the smart contracts used by the protocol are permissionless and non-custodial. This means that streams, vesting plans, and airdrop claims continue to function on-chain even if the company stops developing the project. Berg also assured clients that there is no need to exit your positions just because Sablier Labs is entering the maintenance mode.
The most significant modifications pertain to the future use of the official platform and not to existing uses. As of July 13, the Sablier Interface is no longer able to allow for the creation of vesting streams or airdrops past June 2028, and it has stopped supporting any open-ended payment streams altogether.
Sablier Labs has also reiterated that there will be no launch of any new products or expansion into new blockchain networks. The company’s concentration will be on maintaining the interface and backend infrastructure until June 2028, which will enable all the current users to keep using the protocol seamlessly.
Berg indicated that once this period of maintenance is completed, he envisions that responsibility for the project would pass into the hands of the wider community, probably through a hosted open-source version of the protocol. He clarified that June 2028 should not be seen as the time Sablier stops its operations. It should be regarded as the moment when maintenance funded by the company comes to an end but it does not mean that the protocol cannot continue to function independently.
An important additional development relates to the licensing of the software of Sablier. Initially, the main EVM smart contracts of the protocol were licensed under Business Source License (BSL) 1.1 and were scheduled for release under GNU General Public License (GPL) on July 1, 2029. However, as a result of earlier decisions of Berg, this process was hastened to July 13, 2026.
This allowed developers to have the right to fork, modify, and redeploy the smart contracts at once, whereas they were initially supposed to wait until 2029. The crypto publication Bankless referred to that early switching of the license as the project’s “parting gift” to the community.
Why the company is stepping back
Berg has stated that Q1 2026 was tough for Sablier, referring to the fact that the company’s usage and revenue decreased sharply although the company delivered more features than in any previous quarter. He gave two reasons for the decline: clients postponed their token launches due to the decline of the cryptocurrency market; and the emergence of AI-assisted coding technology made Sablier’s services easy to replicate.
Sablier’s more ambitious vision did not come to fruition as expected either. Upon the launch of the project in 2019, the company believed that an increasing number of financial operations would migrate online, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) would become sufficiently widespread, and token streams would become a common method of payments. From some point of view, such predictions turned out to be right, but they never reached the necessary level to sustain Sablier’s business model.
Berg admitted that there was considerable progress made by the crypto sector in various fields. Rather than facilitating payments, the greatest demand for crypto has been related to speculative trading and prediction markets as well, but also decentralized lending and many other financial services. In his view, rather than creating a new niche in the market, token streaming was seen as a feature of other crypto solutions.
The other endeavors undertaken by the company such as Sablier Mainnet, a tailored version of EVM rollup, the use of NFTs as a source of collateral, and AI instruments also failed to make an impact.
The company had started withdrawing from Solana. On June 2, Sablier announced that its Solana application will continue to operate as an interface for making claims without shutting it down completely. While the front end has been downsized, the underlying program technology deployed on blockchain remains active, allowing existing users to continue making claims for their tokens.
What Sablier leaves behind
According to Sablier’s own statistics, it has processed activity from over 345,000 Ethereum addresses through over 837,000 transactions and paid out over 547,000 vesting plans, claims from airdrops, and streams of payments. It has provided services in more than 30 EVM chains plus Solana, and its founder is the author of ERC-1620, the money-streaming standard introduced in 2018.
Berg expressed that he takes pride in the accomplishment related to the fact that they have not seen any security incidents throughout all the years of contracts with funds of users being managed.
Next to consider is the stewardship plan. As per Berg’s statement, Sablier will be disclosing the details pertaining to hosting and handover to the community in advance of the cut-off date of June 2028. Users holding streaming accounts that have a term longer than June 2028 carry the maximum risk, given that any unforeseen bugs would appear once the team has disbanded.
Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It’s free.