Acala and its sister network Karura have proposed a coordinated shutdown on February 10, 2027, after roughly seven years of development, citing insufficient DeFi liquidity across the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems. The plan depends on approval of Acala referendum #195 and Karura referendum #137.
The shutdown timeline requires users to withdraw external assets before February, with earlier deadlines for liquid-staking positions. Native ACA and KAR tokens will remain on their respective chains after block production stops, while remaining external assets face a best-effort return process with no guarantee every asset can be recovered.
In a community letter, the Acala team said both networks had entered maintenance mode without significant protocol upgrades or growth. The plan keeps withdrawals and cross-chain routes running during the exit period before both chains stop producing blocks.
DefiLlama dashboards dated November 9 showed only $257,223 in DeFi total value locked on Acala and $44,200 on Karura. The team explained that Polkadot’s multichain design divided liquidity, users and attention among parachains, and wallet infrastructure failed to make transfers seamless.
Acala secured Polkadot’s first parachain auction and Karura won Kusama’s first. Previous expansion efforts included a 2022 Wormhole integration and an Astar partnership. However, the networks never developed the trading depth needed to support stablecoin, lending and liquid-staking products safely at scale.
Under the proposed schedule, users must remove DOT, KSM, USDT, USDC and other bridged assets before February 10, 2027. For ordinary LDOT positions, the unbonding deadline is January 12, 2027, allowing 28 days for DOT to become available. LDOT locked to a specific validator requires an additional 28 days to unlock, bringing the cutoff to December 16, 2026. LKSM holders must begin unbonding by February 2, 2027 for the seven-day KSM waiting period.
Users with aUSD or aSEED loans must repay them and free collateral before transferring assets out. Liquidity providers must remove liquidity first, while lcDOT holders are directed to withdraw through the Acala or Euphrates app. The team committed to maintaining collators, RPC nodes and valid coretime until shutdown.
The letter also revisited the August 2022 aUSD minting incident. Although almost all mistakenly minted aUSD was recovered and burned, and the foundation used its own funds to cover the shortfall, the stablecoin never fully regained users’ trust.
External assets held by Acala’s treasury would be donated to the Polkadot Treasury, while Karura’s would go to the Kusama Treasury. Native treasury tokens would remain on their respective networks. The team warned that stopped chains retain public code and a final state that someone could restart, but without active maintenance a governance flaw could expose assets left behind.
