On November 11, 2026, BlockBeats reported that the Acala team had formally submitted on-chain governance Referendum #195, proposing an orderly sunset of the Acala network on Polkadot. At the same time, its sister chain Karura on Kusama opened the corresponding Referendum #137. If both referenda pass, the two chains would stop producing blocks on February 10, 2027, ending about seven years of operation.
In a public letter to the community, the team said DeFi liquidity depth in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems had remained insufficient and had been further split by the multi-parachain structure. Operating costs had exceeded revenue, and continuing to run the networks was no longer sustainable. That statement is the team’s reported cost-and-liquidity reason, not a claim about token prices or future returns.
Exit rules if the proposals pass
Users would need to withdraw external assets themselves before February 10, 2027. Those assets include DOT, KSM, and assets brought in over bridges, such as USDT and USDC.
Liquid-staking positions have earlier deadlines:
- LDOT bound to validators must start unlocking before December 16, 2026.
- Ordinary LDOT must have an unbonding request submitted before January 12, 2027.
- LKSM must complete unbonding before February 2, 2027.
Native ACA and KAR cannot be withdrawn across chains. Under the proposal they would stay permanently on their respective chains. The report describes no cross-chain exit for those balances.
Who keeps the exit open, and what is left behind
The team said that, until the deadline, it would keep running collators and RPC nodes and hold valid coretime so exit channels remain open. After the cutoff, remaining external assets would be returned on a best-effort basis to the matching addresses on Polkadot or Kusama Asset Hub. Full recovery is not guaranteed. External assets in the treasuries are planned to be donated to the treasuries of the corresponding relay chains.
As of the November 11, 2026 report, the referenda were still in progress. They are signal votes. Whether the shutdown is carried out still depends on holders.
The deadlines change the incentive to act, not a published supply cap. External assets and liquid-staking positions have dated windows; missing them shifts recovery to a best-effort process without a full guarantee. ACA and KAR, by contrast, have no described path off their chains.
The 2021 first-auction cohort
The report looks back at the five winners of Polkadot’s first parachain auctions in 2021: Acala, Moonbeam, Astar, Parallel Finance, and Clover. It says most have substantially exited or stalled.
- Moonbeam formally stopped producing blocks around July 31, 2026, and migrated its token GLMR to Base.
- After a security incident, Parallel Finance gradually closed its products on Polkadot and Kusama. On-chain infrastructure was no longer running normally, and users had to check balances manually through a legacy interface.
- Clover had transformed or left its original parachain identity.
- Among those first-auction winners, the project still described as actively maintaining its chain and continuing runtime upgrades was mainly Astar.
Original design and the later blockspace model
The report restates Polkadot’s original aim as solving a period when scalability, interoperability, and security were hard to achieve together. Single chains such as Ethereum then faced throughput limits; cross-chain transfers depended on centralized bridges or complex relays; and security was difficult to place under one guarantee.
Over time, the auction model’s high threshold and locked capital, fragmented liquidity, and stronger outside competition left many parachains without enough market depth. The report notes that Polkadot has since moved to Agile Coretime, selling blockspace more flexibly, and is advancing architecture work including JAM. It also says the exits of early flagship projects have led outside observers to look again at the practical difficulties of that multi-chain design. Those points are presented as context from the report, not as a forecast of remaining-token value.
Original report: BlockBeats, November 11, 2026, 12:51 CST
