Originally reported by BlockBeats on November 11, 2026, at 12:51 p.m. UTC+8.
Acala’s team submitted on-chain governance proposal Referendum #195 to wind down its Polkadot network. Its sister chain on Kusama, Karura, opened a corresponding vote, Referendum #137. If both proposals pass, the chains would stop producing blocks on February 10, 2027, after roughly seven years of operation. The votes were still in progress when BlockBeats reported the proposals; the team described them as signaling votes, with execution dependent on holders’ wishes.
In a public letter to the community, the team attributed the proposed shutdowns to insufficient DeFi liquidity across Polkadot and Kusama, further fragmentation across parachains, and operating costs that had exceeded returns. That is the team’s explanation, not evidence that the shutdowns have already been approved.
Withdrawal dates if the proposals pass
Users would need to withdraw external assets—including DOT, KSM, and bridged USDT and USDC—before February 10, 2027. Liquid-staking positions have earlier deadlines:
- Validator-bound LDOT: begin unlocking by December 16, 2026.
- Other LDOT: request unbonding by January 12, 2027.
- LKSM: complete unbonding by February 2, 2027.
The native tokens ACA and KAR cannot be withdrawn across chains and would remain on their respective chains permanently. The team said it would continue operating collators and RPC nodes and holding valid coretime until the deadline to keep exit routes available. Afterward, it would try to return remaining external assets to corresponding addresses on the Polkadot or Kusama Asset Hub, without guaranteeing full recovery. It also plans to donate external assets in the treasuries to the corresponding relay-chain treasuries.
The broader parachain question
BlockBeats placed the proposals alongside the trajectories of Polkadot’s five initial 2021 parachain-auction winners: Acala, Moonbeam, Astar, Parallel Finance, and Clover. It reported that Moonbeam stopped producing blocks around July 31, 2026, and migrated GLMR to Base; Parallel Finance gradually closed its Polkadot and Kusama products after a security incident, leaving users to check balances through a legacy interface; and Clover changed direction or left its original parachain role. Of that group, BlockBeats identified Astar as the main project still actively maintained with continuing runtime upgrades.
Polkadot’s original multichain vision sought to address scalability, interoperability, and security together. The reported exits expose a gap between that ambition and the market depth early parachains achieved. BlockBeats cited auction costs and locked-up capital, fragmented liquidity, and external competition as pressures on the model, while noting Polkadot’s shift to Agile Coretime and work on JAM. Those changes do not, by themselves, establish a different outcome for Acala or Karura: their proposed shutdowns still depend on the governance process.