Lisk to Shut Down Blockchain on October 31, Ending Africa-Focused Expansion Plan
Key Takeaways
- •Lisk plans to shut down its blockchain on October 31, 2026.
- •The company launched a $15 million fund in 2025 to support Web3 startups across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.
- •In February 2026, Nigerian exchange Quidax partnered with Lisk to provide developers access to stablecoins and local currencies.
- •Lisk said its Ethereum Layer-2 network could not generate enough revenue to sustain ecosystem incentives and maintenance costs.
- •The Lisk DAO is considering burning 100 million LSK, which would cut the token supply from 400 million to 300 million.
Lisk will shut down its blockchain on October 31, 2026, ending a strategy that had increasingly placed Africa and other emerging markets at the center of its growth plans.
The Swiss blockchain project made a major push into emerging markets, including the launch of a $15 million fund in 2025 to support Web3 startups across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Lisk said the fund was intended to back companies solving real-world problems rather than speculative projects, and it described the region as a largely overlooked opportunity.
Africa was one of the most visible parts of that strategy.
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Lisk aimed to build an ecosystem around startups using blockchain for payments, financial services, and other applications. In markets such as Nigeria, the network also sought to position itself as infrastructure for stablecoins and local-currency access. In February 2026, Nigerian crypto exchange Quidax partnered with Lisk to give developers access to stablecoins and local currencies through its infrastructure.
That investment is now effectively being wound down.
Lisk said its Ethereum Layer-2 network failed to generate enough revenue after about two and a half years, while ecosystem incentives and the cost of maintaining the network made the model unsustainable. The company is now abandoning the blockchain business and shifting toward a financial-operations platform for businesses focused on bank accounts, stablecoins, payments, and money management.
LATEST | THE LISK CHAIN IS WINDING DOWN The #Ethereum L2 layer has also proposed the cessation of the #LISKDAO . @Lisk says the ‘Lisk Chain has been struggling with generating enough revenue that can flow back to the LSK token, and ecosystem incentives paid in LSK tokens have… pic.twitter.com/kPGCx8pfcg — BitKE (@BitcoinKE) August 26, 2026
The reversal is notable because Lisk had only recently strengthened its focus on emerging markets. Its $15 million fund was launched less than a year ago with a mandate covering Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. The project had framed the strategy as a way to capture opportunities in markets it said traditional venture capital was overlooking, while also backing incubation and grant programs for African founders.
The shutdown also follows Lisk’s earlier move away from its original Layer-1 blockchain. The project rebuilt as an Ethereum Layer-2 in late 2023, making the network now being closed a relatively young version of the platform. For users and builders, that means the wind-down is not just a corporate pivot but also the end of an infrastructure layer that had only recently been reintroduced in a new form.
For Africa’s crypto industry, the development underscores a broader issue: capital entering emerging markets does not automatically translate into durable blockchain infrastructure. Lisk invested heavily in building an ecosystem around African and other emerging-market startups, but it ultimately concluded that operating its own blockchain could not produce an economically sustainable business.
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The company will now move in the opposite direction, away from operating a blockchain and toward using existing financial and blockchain infrastructure to provide business finance tools.
The Lisk DAO is also considering burning 100 million LSK, which would reduce the token’s total supply from 400 million to 300 million. In addition, LSK holders on the Lisk Chain will need to migrate their tokens before the network closes.
For African Web3 founders, the significance extends beyond Lisk itself. One of the projects that made some of the clearest financial commitments to building an emerging-market blockchain ecosystem is now retreating from the infrastructure it spent years promoting.
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