Infra Graveyard Weekly #05: DFK Chain is dead, and $236,000 stayed inside

Deprecations and shutdowns in crypto infrastructure, the part a developer has to act on. "Days left" counts from 31 August 2026, and all times are UTC.

1. Deadline board

Expired since #04 — four deadlines in one week, a record for this series: BitMEX stopped opening positions (26 August 04:00), DFK Chain stopped (last block 29 August 04:25 UTC, a day later than announced — see below), LayerZero killed offchain services for ten chains (28 August), BitMEX ended Convert for 11 tokens (28 August 04:00).

2. What happened to DFK Chain, and where did the money end up?

The chain stopped on 29 August at 04:25 UTC — a day later than announced. The last block on DFK Chain is 62,472,734; checked on 31 August, the head has not moved in 2.4 days. On the announced day itself, the 28th, the chain was still running and had in fact sped up threefold: 202 blocks an hour against 67–71 in early August — the trace of people finally running.

The RPC still answers, serving reads of frozen state: eth_blockNumber returns the same number, eth_call works. A liveness check based on "does the node respond" reports "alive" three days after death. Liveness is only visible in the timestamp of the last block — and that is exactly the check nobody performs.

$235,970 is inside the pools, permanently. That is the final measurement, taken at the last block, across all 577 pairs of the factory. And the largest holder of stranded value is not a working contract but an abandoned one: $97,287 (41.2%) in the retired Master Gardener, $92,481 (39.2%) staked in Gardens, $46,202 (19.6%) sitting free in wallets.

The entire exit happened in the last week. Over the 18 days to 22 August, 13.6% left — which confirms issue #04's measurement that the liquidity had not moved. Over the following six days: 43.7%. Over the final day of the chain's life: another 9.1%. Counted in LP units at 22 August prices, so that a falling token price is not reported as an outflow. Total across the whole observation: −55.8%.

Only the people still in the game ran. Across the full observation, Gardens is down 73.7% and free LP in wallets down 42.1% — while the old Master Gardener lost essentially nothing: −2.8% over 24 days and five measurements.

Waiting cost 68% of the position. CRYSTAL fell from $0.002431 to $0.000782 over those same six days: the crowd exiting through thin pools is that drawdown. Whoever unwound last received a third of what someone who unwound on 22 August did — even though both got out in time.

The point of a story this series has followed since 14 August: the date was announced on 31 July, a checking tool was sitting there in the open, the reprieve ran a further day — and $236k stayed inside anyway. Not "didn't make it" but "never showed up": forty per cent of the stranded value sits in a contract nobody approached even once in a month of measurements.

Primary source: our own scans at fixed blocks with the open registry in dfk-chain-sunset.

3. Who maintains IPFS after 30 September?

Nobody has said. Shipyard — the independent collective of IPFS maintainers assembled in 2024 from former Protocol Labs staff — is winding down engineering, maintenance and infrastructure operations on 30 September 2026: Protocol Labs did not renew the funding.

Left without dedicated maintainers: Kubo, Helia, Boxo, Rainbow, IPFS Desktop, IPFS Companion, Someguy, Service Worker Gateway, IPFS Check.

No longer operated: ipfs.io, dweb.link, check.ipfs.network, delegated-ipfs.dev, the IPFS bootstrap nodes and the Wikipedia-on-IPFS cluster. The fate of the domains has not been announced: "Protocol Labs, as the owner of the domains and infrastructure, will determine their future."

The degradation has already started. The official IPFS blog, 25 August: rate limiting on ipfs.io and dweb.link for hotlink and backend traffic is already switched on and will tighten. So 30 September is not where the problem begins — it is where it ends.

On the IPFS forum, the questions "who will keep ipfs.io up" and "who maintains Kubo and Helia after 30 September" have no official answer: the only link in the thread is to that same gateway post.

Action, today: check whether your backend talks to ipfs.io, dweb.link or delegated-ipfs.dev. If it does, you are already being rate limited. Move browser code to @helia/verified-fetch or the Drop-In Service Worker; move server code to your own node (Rainbow, Someguy, Kubo) or a paid gateway.

Primary sources: ipshipyard.com · blog.ipfs.tech, 25 August · the unanswered thread

4. New this week

Degen Chain switches off on 31 August

The team is winding down its L3 in favour of products in the Base ecosystem; Alchemy's changelog recorded on 24 August that support for degen-mainnet ends 31 August. The order is the same as DFK's: the plumbing goes first, then the chain. LayerZero killed offchain services on 28 August — three days before the chain itself.

Primary source: Alchemy changelog

Phantom drops Sui, and Monad right behind it

On 24 August Phantom announced that on 24 September it will stop displaying, sending and swapping Sui assets; on 26 August Monad was switched off the same way. The assets remain on their chains and open with the same seed phrase in Slush or another Sui-compatible wallet — just not inside Phantom.

A new class of event for the board: not a chain dying, and not an RPC provider dropping support, but a client dropping it — the first link in the chain that an end user actually sees.

Primary source: Phantom help centre

BounceBit is not being repaired, because the framework is already dead

After an authorisation exploit (286.5m BB, roughly $3m, from nine mainnet accounts between 21:02 UTC on 19 August and 01:54 UTC on 20 August), the team announced on 21 August that it will not restore its L1. BB is being reissued as a BEP-20 on BNB Chain against a snapshot of block 20,697,260 — seconds before the first attacker transaction.

The stated reason for not repairing it: Evmos, the framework the chain was built on, was discontinued earlier in 2026. A chain on a dead framework turned out to be unrepairable.

Balances under 10 BB go to a separate claims portal "later"; the roles of gas, staking, rewards and governance are undefined. Where this meets the board: BounceBit is on LayerZero's 30 September list — the bridge services will outlive the chain.

Chainlink published a deprecation two days after the shutdown

On 21 August, two Deprecation entries appeared in the Chainlink changelog — Data Streams on Arbitrum, and Data Feeds on Ethereum, Sonic, BNB Chain, Arbitrum and Base.

The announcement contains no dates; it points at deprecation pages. The dates live in the reference directory those pages are rendered from (reference-data-directory.vercel.app), and we pulled them from there: C3M/EUR, MAVIA/USD, USR/USD, PumpBTC/BTC, ZAR/USD, WMTx/USD and LBTC/BTC on Sonic are all dated 19 August 2026 — the publication trailed its own shutdown by two days.

Some of the announced feeds have no date at all: MAVIA/USD on Base, LBTC/BTC on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum and BNB, USD/ARS on Base, USR/USD on Base and BNB carry no shutdownDate (checked on 28 August across 34 mainnet networks in the directory).

Exactly three feeds in the whole directory have a shutdown date in the future, all on Ethereum and all on 2 September: CSPX/USD, IB01/USD, IBTA/USD — prices for a tokenised S&P 500 and two treasury ETFs. Those are the ones on the board.

Primary sources: Chainlink changelog · the feed reference directory https://reference-data-directory.vercel.app/feeds-<network>.json (checked 28 August)

Secret Network: the developer leaves, the chain stays with the community

SCRT Labs ends development and support of the Cosmos-based Secret L1 on 1 September. The wording is their own, from the SCRT Labs signalling proposal of 21 July: "Regardless of how the vote goes, SCRT Labs will conclude its development and related support of the Cosmos-based Secret L1 on September 1, 2026". That date appears in the migration proposal that was rejected, and nowhere else: not in the scrt.network blog (checked 28 August; the most recent post is from 11 August and is about something else), and not in the text of the continuation proposal that passed.

The votes were checked on-chain rather than from write-ups: proposal 360 (migrate to Arbitrum) was rejected on 28 July, proposal 365, "Community Continuance of Secret Network (L1)", was passed on 19 August. On 21 August it shipped the v1.26.0-community-continuance upgrade with an emission of 1.079bn SCRT — about 75% above the proposal, overnight — into funds to pay for continuation without the original developer.

Primary sources: the SCRT Labs signalling proposal · on-chain, cosmos/gov/v1/proposals/360 and /365 via the public LCD secretnetwork-api.lavenderfive.com

5. Deep dive: a public gateway is not infrastructure

It is somebody's courtesy, and courtesies are withdrawn gradually. The IPFS story shows the whole mechanism: first the maintenance funding runs out, then rate limiting arrives "for hotlink and backend traffic", then a date appears by which all of this needed to be finished. A product that calls ipfs.io from its backend does not break on 30 September — it starts degrading now, and in the logs that looks like "sometimes slow".

The plumbing falls off before the chain does. Degen repeated DFK's order: LayerZero pulled offchain services on 28 August, the chain switches off on the 31st. Whoever watches the changelogs of the providers, rather than the announcements of the teams, learns about the ending first — which is, in fact, the entire point of this digest.

Obsolescence fires on a delay. BounceBit was not repaired not because nobody wanted to, but because there was nothing to repair it with: Evmos had been discontinued earlier. Every dependency on an unmaintained framework is a deferred sentence, carried out by the first incident that comes along.

6. What to do, in order

1. Today: check whether your backend talks to ipfs.io, dweb.link or delegated-ipfs.dev. If it does, you are already rate limited. Browser code moves to @helia/verified-fetch or the Drop-In Service Worker; server code to your own node or a paid gateway.
2. By 31 August: withdraw assets from Degen Chain.
3. By 1 September: return wrapped TON and j-tokens through TON Bridge-v3 (transfer fees are zeroed); upgrade the Etherscan key for Gnosis; repoint Polygon image pulls to GHCR; re-cost Stargate transfers.
4. By 2 September 04:00 UTC: close positions in the 11 delisted BitMEX contracts. Also on 2 September — move CSPX/USD, IB01/USD and IBTA/USD reads off Chainlink.
5. By 21 September: if your product is sold against a FIPS 140 requirement, check the CMVP queue for a 140-3 submission; after that date the old certificate only covers systems already deployed.
6. By 24 September: Sui holders in Phantom — swap, or move the seed phrase to a Sui-compatible wallet.
7. By 30 September: move calls off the 11 Alchemy NFT API endpoints; withdraw LP from the five chains LayerZero is leaving.
8. A rule, not an item: check the changelogs of whoever operates a thing, not the documentation of whoever built it. Across four consecutive issues, the documentation has never once known about a shutdown — not at DFK, not at TON.

7. Watch

• The IPFS domains — ipfs.io and dweb.link have no announced owner or fate after 30 September; Protocol Labs will "determine their future".
• Chainlink feeds with no date — MAVIA/USD on Base, LBTC/BTC on four chains, USD/ARS and USR/USD on Base and BNB are announced as deprecated with no shutdownDate at all.
• Sui — "mid-October" still has no day attached upstream.
• Secret Network — a chain now running on 1.079bn newly emitted SCRT and no original developer. Whether community continuance holds is a question for the coming months.

8. What we ship

• The DFK Chain sunset scanner — /tools/dfk-chain-sunset on our site, with the registry and CLI open at github.com/sergeipalii/dfk-chain-sunset. All five measurements of the chain were taken with it, at fixed blocks, and are therefore reproducible.
• The TON Bridge measurement script, also reproducible; the second measurement is taken after 1 September.

---

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