Sophon sets Nov. 25 withdrawal deadline before mainnet shutdown

Sophon told users Monday to empty their wallets by Nov. 25. The entertainment-focused Ethereum layer 2 will begin retiring key infrastructure and related websites that day, and the mainnet itself goes dark five days later, on Nov. 30. Any assets still on Sophon after the shutdown risk becoming permanently inaccessible, the project said on X and Cointelegraph reported.

The checklist is short and non-negotiable. Users need to withdraw Sophon tokens, Ether, USDC, and any other assets sitting on the chain, and claim outstanding staking and Guardian rewards before the cut-off. Once bridges and RPC nodes are retired, there is no recovery path.

Why the chain is dying

The decision was announced in June. Sophon's developers said the cost of running a standalone blockchain no longer justified the benefits, and pivoted to consumer finance and AI applications on Base, Coinbase's layer 2, Crypto Briefing reported. New deposits were disabled on June 25, and on-chain activity has been minimal ever since.

The math was straightforward. Running the chain cost roughly $3.4 million a year, and the shutdown is projected to save about $3 million annually. That is the price of running sequencers, bridges, RPC endpoints, and the websites around them for a network that almost nobody was using. Sophon launched as a zkSync ZK Stack hyperchain, meaning it settled to Ethereum while running its own execution environment, a structure sold as a way to give consumer apps their own lane without paying Ethereum mainnet fees. The lane existed. The traffic did not.

Sophon raised $60 million through a node sale in 2024, after a separate $10 million funding round. Node sales were popular that cycle: projects sold infrastructure hardware promises to retail buyers before the networks they supported had users. Sophon is now the part of that story that gets written when the spreadsheet closes. Crypto Briefing put total raises between $60 million and $70 million.

The project's token, SOPH, served two jobs on the network: paying gas and staking. Both jobs end with the chain. Staking rewards, Guardian rewards, and farm positions all need to be claimed before Nov. 25, because the contracts that administer them go offline with everything else.

What happens to the token

Sophon is not abandoning SOPH entirely. The new model ties the token to revenue from the team's Base-based products, with a portion funding buybacks and burns. The supply stays fixed at 10 billion. The first product in the new direction is Pyre, described as a gamified neofinance app. Whether buybacks funded by a new app can support a token that used to be gas on a dead chain is an open question, and the market's answer so far has been a market capitalization under $10 million.

The market has already priced the transition. SOPH trades between $0.0018 and $0.002, giving it a market capitalization of $9 million to $10 million against $60 million to $70 million raised. That gap is the cost of the old strategy, measured in the only unit markets care about.

Part of a pattern

Sophon is not alone. Abstract, the consumer layer 2 from Pudgy Penguins parent company Igloo, announced on Oct. 6 that it would close on Dec. 15 after Igloo lost tens of millions of dollars supporting the network, Cointelegraph noted. Two consumer-focused Ethereum layer 2s, two shutdowns in the same season, both citing the same arithmetic: the infrastructure bill outran the user base.

For anyone still holding assets on Sophon, the five-day buffer between Nov. 25 and Nov. 30 is not a grace period to plan around. Bridges stop, RPC nodes stop, and the chain stops. The websites that let users check balances and claim rewards go dark with the infrastructure. Move funds first, ask questions after.