Infra Graveyard Weekly #04: DFK Chain dies in four days, and the money hasn't moved

Deprecations and shutdowns in crypto infrastructure, the part a developer has to act on. "Days left" counts from 24 August 2026, and all times are UTC.

1. Deadline board

Nothing expired since #03. The next deadline, BitMEX on 26 August, fires two days after this issue.

2. New this week

Why is DFK Chain still holding everyone's money four days before it dies? [quiet]

What changed: nothing — and that is the finding. We measured the chain on 14 August while building a contract registry, and again on 22 August with the same tool: 14 documented pairs, reserves read from chain, prices taken from the pools themselves (USDC = 1, everything else through a USDC pool). Block 62438861, 2026-08-22 00:30 UTC.

Around $620,000 is still in the pools by our own pricing — an order of magnitude, not a quote, since nobody arbitrages a chain being switched off. The outflow we saw in early August had already stopped by the 14th; since then, fractions of a percent have left.

Who is affected: anyone holding JEWEL, CRYSTAL, LP positions, heroes, pets or equipment there — including anyone who checked a wallet balance, saw a staked LP position report as zero, and concluded they were clear.

Action, before 2026-08-28: check positions, not balances — stake in Gardens, stake in the old MasterGardener, heroes on quests, items in the auction house. Break every LP position. Bridge non-native assets yourself: only DFK-native items are part of the project's migration. Nothing left behind is recoverable.

One more thing worth stating plainly: docs.defikingdoms.com still does not mention the shutdown at all. Checked on 22 August — not one occurrence of "sunset", "retire", "migrate", "shut down", "C-Chain" or "August 28"; the page still says Crystalvale lives on DFK Chain. We first checked on 7 August with the same result.

Primary sources: docs.defikingdoms.com; our own scan at block 62438861, run with the DFK Chain sunset scanner — it needs no wallet connection, and its registry is open source.

Which Alchemy NFT endpoints stop answering on 30 September? [quiet]

What changed: an 18 August changelog entry removes 11 NFT API endpoints, V2 and V3 alike, on 30 September 2026.

Who is affected: anyone calling the collection-level helpers (getCollectionsForOwner, getCollectionMetadata, searchContractMetadata, isHolderOfCollection), the spam and rarity helpers (getSpamContracts, summarizeNftAttributes, computeRarity), invalidateContract, isAirdrop or getNFTSales.

Action: most map onto a V3 replacement — getContractsForOwner, getContractMetadata, getNFTsForOwner, isSpamContract, trait aggregation through getNFTsForContract; invalidateContract needs nothing, since refreshNftMetadata stays. Two have no replacement at all — isAirdrop / isAirdropNFT and getNFTSales, where Alchemy points you at support. If your product depends on either, that decision belongs this month, not the last week of September.

Primary source: alchemy.com/docs/changelog

The other two new deadlines are in the board and need no elaboration: BitMEX's 11 delistings (announcement, 18 August) and LayerZero's pricing change (announcement, 11 August), both of which follow from things this digest has been tracking since #01.

3. Quiet changes

Polygon zkEVM: the claim window outlives the tooling [quiet]

QuickNode's 17 August changelog records the removal of Polygon zkEVM and Sophon, Mainnet and Testnet, effective 31 July, documentation included. Sophon is consistent with the rest of the board — the foundation decommissioned the network. zkEVM is the interesting one: its claim window against the exit snapshot runs to 31 December 2027, so provider support ended two and a half years before the right to claim does. That is the shape of every residue procedure, not a zkEVM quirk: the paperwork outlives the infrastructure you would need to file it.

Primary source: quicknode.com/docs/changelog

Avalanche archived HyperSDK — and the whole toolchain with it [quiet]

On 21 August ava-labs/hypersdk (231 stars) was archived, along with hypersdk-explorer, hypersdk-client and hypersdk-starter-kit. The archive date is not the story: the last commit is from 16 May 2025, so the repository stood still for fifteen months while looking, to anyone choosing what to build an L1 on, like a maintained framework. No deprecation notice in the README, no successor named, and no announcement we could find in issues or through search. avalanchego remains active.

Primary source: github.com/ava-labs/hypersdk

MACI was archived; npm was not told [quiet]

privacy-ethereum/maci (596 stars) — the private-voting protocol behind quadratic-funding rounds — was archived on 19 August. Its last commit, on 21 July, was feat(workflows): stop nightly runs: CI went off a month before the archive. Version 3.0.0 shipped on 15 June under new package names, @maci-protocol/*, while the old maci-cli and maci-contracts sit at 2.5.0 from 20 November 2024 and are not marked deprecated. npm i maci-cli today installs a two-year-old package with no warning, and maci.pse.dev says nothing about the archive.

Primary sources: github.com/privacy-ethereum/maci, registry.npmjs.org/maci-cli

Porto: the open question from #02 has an answer [quiet]

In #02 we noted Porto's repository was archived with the fate of leftover funds unstated. The README now reads "Porto is deprecated" and links to a recovery flow at id.porto.sh/recover.

Primary source: github.com/ithacaxyz/porto

4. Deep dive: an announcement is not a mechanism

Two measurements of the same chain, eight days apart, and the money did not move. That is the most useful thing this issue can tell you, and it is not about DeFi Kingdoms.

The shutdown was announced on 31 July, it was covered, and it has everything a working announcement should have: a date, a required action, and a consequence stated plainly — what stays cannot be recovered. Eight days of measurement show fractions of a percent leaving.

Two mechanics explain most of it, and both generalise. The first is that a wallet does not show a staked position: 84% of the liquidity here sits inside two contracts, so the balance screen reports approximately nothing where the money actually is. An inventory taken from wallet balances is incomplete by construction, on any chain. The second is that the announcement and the documentation are different channels. The docs have not mentioned the shutdown on either date we checked, so a developer who opens the artifact they were told to trust reads that the chain is alive.

If you are switching something off, the announcement is the beginning of the work: the deadline has to reach the docs, the release notes, the package registry — every artifact that still says "this works". If you depend on it, the version is shorter: check positions rather than balances, and never take a docs page as evidence that a service is alive.

5. Watch

• Etherscan changelog — no August entries at all. First dry issue for our richest source; noting it, not demoting it.
• QuickNode Functions — still deprecated with no shutdown date named anywhere. Carried since #01.
• Sui — mid-October code removal still has no day attached upstream.
• Solana News RSS, HN sweep — dry again.

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Infra Graveyard Weekly covers developer-facing deprecations and shutdowns in crypto infrastructure — the changelog layer, not the headlines. Subscribe via RSS or by email.