Silicon Network Is Shutting Down: You Have Until December 31 to Bridge Your Balance Out

Silicon Network, an Ethereum layer 2 from the orbit of the South Korean exchange Korbit, is being shut down. Since September 2, 2026 the bridge has accepted no further deposits. Anyone still holding a balance there can bring it back to Ethereum until December 31, 2026 at 12:00 Korean time. After that the explorer closes, the network is terminated, and whatever has been left behind cannot, according to the operator, be recovered.

This news affects very few investors in Germany directly. Silicon Network was never a large chain, and anyone who never bridged there has nothing to do. The case is interesting all the same, because it shows with rare clarity what a dying blockchain looks like: the chain keeps running, it produces a block every three seconds, the web interface is reachable, the explorer answers. It simply no longer carries anything. We measured this ourselves in the night before September 4, and the result appears further down.

The Silicon Network shutdown plan: two dates that count

The operators have split the sequence into two sections in their service notice. The first date has passed: on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, the bridge stopped accepting new deposits, and the testnet was shut down. From that day on there is no route up onto the chain any more, only down from it.

The second date falls on December 31, 2026 at 12:00 in the UTC+9 time zone. Until then the withdrawal window stays open. After that the explorer closes and the network is ended for good. The notice states the consequence without any softening: assets not withdrawn by then cannot be recovered. Enquiries after the closure go through the operator, Ozys.

Converted to Central European Time, the window ends on December 31 at 04:00 in the morning. Anyone pushing the matter to the turn of the year should keep this conversion in mind. The deadline falls on a night when very few people are thinking about their wallet.

Who stands behind the Silicon Network layer 2 chain

A layer 2 is a blockchain of its own that draws its security from a larger chain and settles transactions more cheaply than would be possible on that larger chain. According to the description by the trade service Blockonomi, Silicon Network is such a layer 2 on the Ethereum substrate, built with Polygon's CDK development kit and connected to its Agglayer interconnection layer. The chain is attributed to the orbit of the South Korean trading platform Korbit.

For the question of what you have to do now, the provenance matters less than the construction. A chain of this type does not itself hold the assets brought into it. They sit in a contract on Ethereum, and the chain keeps the ledger recording who is entitled to how much of them. That bookkeeping ends with the shutdown.

Why the deposit direction of the bridge is already closed

A bridge is the device that moves assets between two blockchains: it locks a coin on one chain and credits an image of it on the other. The two directions are technically separate, and that is precisely why one can be closed while the other stays open.

The operator closed the deposit direction first, and that makes sense: every asset still bridged upwards after the announcement would be one more asset that would have to come back down before the deadline. The notice expressly points out that assets still sent or deposited after this announcement may not be processed properly and can no longer be withdrawn or recovered.

For you that means two things. First: send nothing more there, not even inadvertently via a saved address. Second: the open withdrawal direction is a time-limited undertaking, not a permanent facility.

How much capital is still tied up on Silicon Network

Blockonomi puts the remaining holdings on the chain at around 9.75 million US dollars as at September 3, 2026. Broken down, the service names 2.66 million US dollars in USDC, 2.54 million in WBTC, 2.08 million in ether and 1.85 million in USDT. These four items come to about 9.13 million together; the difference to the total is spread across further holdings that the service does not itemise.

We did not recalculate this sum ourselves and therefore report it as a third-party figure. What we were able to measure ourselves appears in the next section, and it adds a side to the number that the number alone does not show.

Our own measurement: 25 empty blocks on a chain that keeps ticking

This analysis was carried out by cryptoticker.io itself on September 4, 2026. Method: direct queries against the public network endpoint of Silicon Network at rpc.silicon.network as well as against four further addresses of the project, in each case between 00:50 and 00:53 UTC. Twenty-five consecutive blocks and four endpoints were examined.

The network endpoint answered with HTTP 200 and reported chain ID 2355. The most recent block carried the number 20,452,486 at the time of measurement, with a timestamp of 00:52:15 UTC. Across a span of one thousand blocks the interval between two blocks came to 3.24 seconds, and across the 25 most recently examined blocks to 3.21 seconds. The chain is therefore still producing blocks by the second.

The finding lies in the content of those blocks. Across all 25 blocks examined, numbers 20,452,462 to 20,452,486, there was not a single transaction between them. In 77 seconds of chain time, nothing happened on Silicon Network. The gas price stood at 0.01 Gwei, the lower limit of what a chain can charge at all.

A second figure fits alongside. The data service DefiLlama reports a value locked in applications of 8,219.53 US dollars for Silicon zkEVM, retrieved on September 4, 2026 with HTTP 200. Set against the roughly 9.75 million US dollars of parked holdings reported by Blockonomi, that puts the actively used share in a ratio of about one to twelve hundred. The money sits there, it no longer works, and it has an expiry date.

The announced testnet stop was confirmed as well: the testnet endpoint at rpc-sepolia.silicon.network answered with HTTP 503 and is therefore no longer in operation. The explorer and the bridge interface remained reachable at the time of measurement, both with HTTP 200.

What we could not check: the size of the bridged holdings themselves, the number of accounts affected, and the question of how many users in Germany are among them. There is no freely available source for any of these figures, and we do not estimate them.

Network-native tokens: why not every holding fits across the bridge

The service notice separates two kinds of holdings, and the difference decides whether your position can be saved. Assets bridged from Ethereum can be brought back to the Ethereum mainnet. For them the route is mapped out.

Network-native tokens are those issued on the chain itself that have no counterpart on Ethereum. According to the operator they cannot be bridged to Ethereum, and the notice openly concedes that liquidity difficulties may arise with them. Dealing with them remains a decision at the user's own discretion and own responsibility.

That is an uncomfortable but honest statement. In practice it means: for such positions there is no guaranteed exit. Anyone holding them can try to swap them on the chain for something bridgeable, for as long as anyone there is still trading at all. Our measurement shows how thin that hope has become.

Gas on a dying chain: why you need ether on the network

Gas is the fee a blockchain charges for executing a transaction, and it is paid in the currency of the chain concerned. On Silicon Network that is ether. The notice makes it expressly clear that users bear these costs themselves and must keep enough ether on the chain for the withdrawal.

From this follows a trap that costs holdings at every chain shutdown: anyone who withdraws their entire ether balance first and saves the remaining tokens for later is left sitting on a position they can no longer move, because the money for the fee is gone. The right order is the reverse. Take everything else out first and only at the end the ether that served as the gas reserve.

The measured gas price of 0.01 Gwei suggests that a few euros will do as a reserve. Even so, do not rely on that down to the last cent. A price sitting at its floor today can rise if many people hit on the idea of tidying up shortly before New Year's Eve.

How to check in a few minutes whether you are affected

The effort is manageable, and it is worth making even if you are fairly sure you have never been on this chain. Open your wallet and look for whether a network with chain ID 2355 is entered there. This ID is unambiguous; it is the most reliable way to identify a chain whose name has been used more than once.

If you find the entry, look at the address in the chain's explorer. A balance of zero means you are in the clear. If something is shown, the next step runs through the project's bridge interface. Anyone holding their balance through Korbit's web3 wallet follows that platform's procedure according to the notice; anyone using their own wallet such as MetaMask withdraws across the bridge and will find a dedicated set of instructions linked in the service notice.

For the destination, the usual consideration applies. An amount you want to leave alone belongs at an address whose keys you hold yourself; our comparison of software wallets ranks the common applications by how they hold keys and which networks they support. Larger amounts belong on a device that never hands the key to a computer.

What happens to holdings left behind on December 31

After the withdrawal window ends, the explorer closes and the network is terminated. That removes the bookkeeping from which it could be derived at all who is entitled to which share of the assets deposited on Ethereum. The operator says plainly that assets not withdrawn cannot be recovered.

This is a different situation from an exchange that closes. There a contractual relationship exists, there is a claim, and in the unfavourable case there is a procedure in which that claim is registered. With a non-custodial chain there is no counterparty who owes you anything. There is only software that at some point stops running. We described the general consequences of such a shutdown at greater length in a separate article on shut-down blockchains and what becomes of the coins.

Silicon Network is no isolated case: the pattern behind the chain shutdowns

Anyone laying the reports of recent weeks side by side will notice a cluster. In August it was the bridge of the TON ecosystem, whose shutdown we wrote up together with the applicable deadlines, and in the days that followed further networks and wallet applications came with deadlines of their own.

The common denominator is economic. Running a chain costs money continuously, and the return depends on people using it. If usage fails to materialise, shutdown becomes the commercially obvious decision. Our measurement shows the end state of that calculation in a single figure: zero transactions across 25 blocks.

From this follows a habit worth adopting. Keep a short list of the networks on which you have ever held a balance and go through it twice a year. On an active chain that costs you a few minutes. On a decommissioned one it decides whether a position still exists.

Identical names and fake help pages: what to watch for when reading up

Pay attention to the exact address when reading up. The service notice on which this article rests sits in the project's technical documentation. The term Silicon is used online by several unconnected offerings, and a search for the bare name quickly leads somewhere else. Take the deadlines from the original notice linked here and not from a retold version. With shutdowns in particular, fake help pages and supposed rescue tools are a known fraud pattern: nobody who genuinely wants to help you needs your recovery words to do so.

Withdrawing your Silicon balance: what to take away

1. Check today, not in December. Look in your wallet for chain ID 2355 and in the explorer for the balance. If nothing is there, you are done. If something is there, bring it across the bridge to Ethereum and then decide at leisure where it should go; which trading venues come into question for the onward route is shown by our comparison of crypto exchanges.
2. Keep to the right order. The remaining tokens first, the ether that carries the fees last. Whatever is meant to sit untouched afterwards belongs on a device with its own key; you will find the differences between the models in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Document the process. Note the date, chain, amount and the address you withdrew to, while the explorer still answers. After December 31 this source of evidence no longer exists. Tools that keep a permanent record of holdings and movements are set against each other in our section on tax tools and portfolio trackers.

The original notice with both dates appears in the Silicon Network shutdown announcement. The assessment of the remaining holdings comes from Blockonomi's reporting of September 3, 2026.

(As of September 4, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)