The announcement in 105 words. On 13 July 2026, Sablier Labs announced it is entering maintenance mode. It is not a shutdown. Active development has stopped. The official interface remains funded and accessible through June 2028, after which stewardship passes to the community as an open-source public good. From 13 July the interface blocks any new vesting stream or airdrop ending after June 2028, blocks all new open-ended payment streams, and will not deploy to new chains. Existing streams, vesting plans and airdrops keep working indefinitely; nobody must migrate. The primary EVM contracts were relicensed from BUSL 1.1 to GPL the same day. Source: Sablier Labs. Last verified 6 September 2026.
Sablier is one of the longest-running protocols in DeFi, and the announcement that its company is stepping back from development was covered by The Defiant and Bankless within hours. Much of the secondary coverage compressed "maintenance mode" into "shutting down," which is wrong and has caused unnecessary worry for teams with live schedules. This page sets out exactly what Sablier Labs said, what it means in practice for anyone with tokens in a Sablier contract, and which dates matter. It is written to be cited, so it stays close to the source and avoids editorialising.
What does maintenance mode mean here?
It means Sablier Labs has stopped building new features and will keep the existing product running. The company has committed to funding and maintaining the official web interface at app.sablier.com through June 2028. Bugs that affect the interface are still addressed; new products, integrations and chain deployments are not. The smart contracts, which are what actually hold and release tokens, do not depend on the company at all; they are deployed on-chain and, in the announcement's words, "will keep doing what it was designed to do."
This is a meaningful distinction from a shutdown. In a shutdown the interface goes dark and users have to interact with contracts directly or through a third-party front end. In maintenance mode the interface stays up for nearly two more years, and the plan is for it to survive beyond that as community-run software.
The three interface restrictions
From 13 July 2026 the official interface enforces three rules that did not exist before.
First, no new vesting stream or airdrop campaign can be created with an end date after June 2028. A two-year schedule started in September 2026 ends in September 2028 and is refused; an eighteen-month schedule ends in March 2028 and is allowed. The restriction is on the end date, not the start date or duration.
Second, no new open-ended payment streams can be created at all. Open-ended streams are the "money streaming" product Sablier was originally known for: a per-second flow with no fixed end, typically used for salaries and payroll. These cannot be started through the interface as of 13 July, regardless of intended duration.
Third, no new chain deployments. Sablier is deployed on more than 30 EVM chains plus Solana, and that list is now final. Chains that launched after July 2026, including Arc and Robinhood Chain, will not receive a Sablier deployment.
These restrictions apply to the official interface. Because the contracts are permissionless, a developer could in principle interact with them directly, or through a fork of the interface, without the restrictions. That is a technical path, not a supported one.
What keeps working
Everything already created. Recipients of existing streams, vesting plans and airdrops can continue to claim and withdraw. Senders can continue to manage their existing plans, including cancelling streams that were created as cancelable. The dashboards, claim pages and public stream links all continue to function through the maintained interface. The announcement is explicit that nobody is required to migrate, and it is worth repeating: if you have a Sablier schedule that ends before June 2028, there is no action you need to take.
Sablier reported lifetime figures of more than 345,000 addresses, 837,000 transactions and 547,000 vesting plans, airdrop claims and payment streams, with no security incidents over the protocol's life. Those contracts are not being altered.
What happens in June 2028?
Sablier Labs' funding commitment for the interface ends. At that point stewardship of the interface transitions to the community; the announcement says "the interface will eventually become an open-source public good." In practice that means the front-end code is expected to be published under an open licence and maintained by whoever in the community chooses to maintain it. The protocol itself, being on-chain, "continues operating without requiring an operator."
What is not yet specified is who the community stewards will be, whether the app.sablier.com domain transfers, or whether Sablier Labs will retain any role. Anyone planning around the June 2028 date should assume that the interface may change hands, may change address, and may or may not be maintained to the same standard afterward. The contracts and your tokens are not affected by any of that.
The GPL relicensing, and what forking means in practice
Sablier's primary EVM smart contracts were licensed under the Business Source License 1.1, which restricts commercial use for a period before converting to an open licence. That conversion was scheduled for 1 July 2029. On 13 July 2026 Sablier Labs moved the conversion forward and relicensed the contracts under the GPL immediately.
The practical meaning: anyone may now copy the contract code, deploy it on any chain, and build a product on it, provided derivative works are also released under the GPL. For a technical team this makes "keep using Sablier's contracts without Sablier's interface" a real option. It also means that community forks of the interface, and third-party products built on the Sablier contracts, are now legally unencumbered. For a non-technical team it changes little, because running your own deployment and front end is not something most projects want to take on.
Why Sablier Labs made this decision
The announcement was unusually candid. Berg wrote that "there isn't a venture-scale business in onchain token distribution," and that "the market isn't large enough today, and we don't think it will become large enough soon enough." On the product side he observed that "money streaming turned out to be a feature inside other products" rather than a standalone business, and that "AI is eating into SaaS," reducing the defensibility of a product that AI-assisted developers can now replicate cheaply. Coverage also cited a first-quarter 2026 revenue decline and delays to customer launches.
He was equally clear that this was not a verdict on the technology or the industry: "I still believe in crypto." The protocol shipped, worked, and processed hundreds of millions of dollars without incident. The company's judgement was that the business around it could not reach the scale its investors needed, and it chose an orderly step-back over a slow one.
Dates that matter
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| 13 July 2026 | Maintenance mode begins. Interface restrictions take effect. Contracts relicensed to GPL. |
| June 2028 | Latest end date the interface allows for new vesting and airdrops. Sablier Labs' funding commitment for the interface ends. |
| After June 2028 | Interface stewardship passes to the community. Contracts continue operating on-chain. |
| 1 July 2029 | Original BUSL-to-open-source conversion date, now moot. |
If your schedule needs to end after June 2028
Most of what is above is reassuring, and it should be: existing users are not affected. The one group with a real decision to make is anyone who needs to create a new schedule ending after June 2028 — a standard multi-year team or investor vesting, for instance — because the interface will not create it. If that is you, here are the options for schedules that end after June 2028, covering the tools that fit each use case, including the ones we don't make.