Blast Reaches Withdrawal Interface Deadline With $40 Million Still in Bridge

Blast reaches its Oct. 26 deadline for withdrawals through its normal interface with about $40.4 million still held in its canonical bridge, leaving late exits reliant on direct contract transactions as the Ethereum Layer 2 winds down.

In its shutdown announcement, Blast said that after Oct. 26, “assets will remain withdrawable,” but users will need to interact directly with its bridge contracts on Ethereum. The deadline changes how users recover funds, rather than ending their ability to withdraw.

DefiLlama’s latest reading, timestamped 3:26 a.m. ET on Oct. 26, valued the bridge’s assets at $40.41 million. That is about 36% below the roughly $63.5 million reading at 9:40 a.m. ET on Oct. 2, previously reported by The Defiant, according to The Defiant’s calculation. These figures measure bridge assets on Ethereum, not deposits in DeFi applications on Blast.

Blast announced the shutdown on Oct. 2, saying the chain’s operating costs exceeded its revenue and that it saw no credible path to economic sustainability. Its bridge website was still displaying withdrawal controls early on Oct. 26, alongside a notice that “Blast is winding down.”

Exiting Without the Website

Blast has published detailed contract-level withdrawal guides for $ETH, USDB and BLAST, including code examples for constructing Ethereum transactions. They are geared toward exchanges and custodians withdrawing from smart contracts; its regular-wallet guide still directs users through the website.

The contract guides describe a process spanning both networks, not a single Ethereum transfer. An $ETH withdrawal starts with a call to Blast’s L2BlastBridge. Once a record of Blast’s state covering that transaction has been posted to Ethereum, the withdrawal must be proven through the OptimismPortal contract, followed by a one-day challenge period and a finalization transaction. Users need $ETH to pay transaction fees on both networks.

For $ETH, finalization also requires a reference to the withdrawal’s processed queue checkpoint, called a `hintId`. Blast’s guide warns that this extra argument makes its finalization call different from those on other OP Stack chains.

USDB holders receive DAI on Ethereum. After proving and finalizing, they must wait for Blast to process the USD withdrawal queue—up to another day under the guide—then submit a separate claim from the recipient address.

The shorter challenge period is now reflected in both Blast’s documentation and L2BEAT’s contract monitoring, which records the change from seven days to one. Direct contract access does not remove every operator dependency: L2BEAT says withdrawals can freeze if the authorized proposers stop publishing state roots, the records of the chain’s state needed to advance withdrawals.