DFK Chain sunset: what to do before 28 August

DeFi Kingdoms is retiring DFK Chain on 28 August 2026 and moving to Avalanche C-Chain. Anything left on the chain when it stops is gone — the team has said bridged assets cannot be recreated or recovered afterwards.

We built a read-only checker for it: paste an address and see everything still sitting there, grouped by what you have to do about it — check an address. No wallet connection, no signing.

This page is the plain-language version: what was announced, where the announcement stops, and the part most people miss.

What was actually announced

One announcement — a thread from @DeFiKingdoms, posted 31 July 2026 at 17:07 UTC. Everything below restates it, read at the source rather than through the news reprints. As of 5 August the official developer documentation still carries no notice of the shutdown at all.

• DFK Chain is retired on 28 August 2026. No time of day was given.
• Bridged assets are your own responsibility. In the team's words: "We cannot migrate or remint or control those tokens, so if you have JEWEL, BTC, USDC, ETH, AVAX, etc, please plan to migrate those assets prior to August 28th." And: "Please don't wait until the last second either."
• Break all liquidity pool positions, including pools made entirely of DFK-native assets.
• Move assets out of smart wallets into a standard wallet before bridging. The team named Halliday wallets specifically — this is aimed at them.
• USDC only bridges across as nUSD, which you then swap back to USDC on Synapse's own site. The team said so on 2 July, when the bridge came back up. If you land on nUSD instead of USDC, nothing was lost — there is one step left.
• JEWEL can already be bridged to Avalanche C-Chain. The team said not to leave it to the final days.
• DeFi Kingdoms-native game assets are covered by a migration the team says it is preparing — wait for their instructions rather than improvising.
• The project is not shutting down; an SDK is planned.

Where the announcement stops

The team said more technical guidance is coming before the deadline. Until it lands, these are open:

• No cutoff time or timezone for 28 August, from any source.
• No word on heroes parked on quests — whether they must be recalled first.
• No word on items listed for sale or rent, which sit in the auction contracts.
• No official inventory tool or migration portal exists.
• The Discord invite on the official site is dead. discord.gg/defikingdoms returns "Unknown Invite" from Discord's own API, so the community's usual gathering place is not reachable from the front page. The Telegram group is alive — 4,857 members when we checked on 5 August.

The part people miss

A wallet balance is not the whole picture on this chain. Three places hold things that are yours but do not appear as your balance.

Staked liquidity

LP tokens deposited into the Gardens contract belong to you, but the pair contract reports your balance as zero. Measured across the fourteen incentivized pools, roughly seven of every ten dollars of liquidity is staked rather than held — about $370k of $533k when we checked on 3 August. If you only look at your wallet, that is what you miss. Unstake first, then remove the liquidity.

The old MasterGardener

Gardens replaced an earlier staking contract in January 2024. Positions left in the old one are still there, still yours, and just as lost at the deadline. It still held around 2.6 million LP tokens when we looked.

Heroes on quests

A hero on a quest is held by the quest contract, not by you, so it does not show up in a wallet or a marketplace view either.

Smart accounts

If you played through a DFK Smart Account — the email or social login rather than a browser wallet — your assets live at a contract address, not at the key you sign with. That is what "move assets out of smart wallets" refers to. There is no way to look that address up from outside: read it from the game client, then check it.

Questions

Is my JEWEL safe if I do nothing?

No. JEWEL is named in the announcement among the assets you are responsible for moving, and it can already be bridged to Avalanche C-Chain.

Should I bridge my heroes myself?

The announcement says game assets are covered by a migration the team is preparing and to wait for instructions. Nothing here contradicts that.

What happens after 28 August?

The chain is retired. Nothing is stated about reading state afterwards, so assume anything left is unreachable.

Where this fits

This is the second chain sunset we have covered in a month. The pattern is routine enough to track deliberately:

Infra Graveyard Weekly #01: Polygon's Erigon namespace is gone, and your provider picked the date

If you would rather see your own position than read about the general case, the checker reads the chain directly and lists what is still there. It is read-only and asks for nothing.