Lisk, a Swiss-based blockchain project is shutting down its network as it pivots toward building a financial operations platform for businesses, marking a significant shift in its strategy.
The company is repositioning itself as a modern money operations platform for businesses, designed to help finance and operations teams manage accounts, payments, and approvals in a single workspace.
The platform also focuses on enabling businesses to move funds across fiat and stablecoin payment rails, particularly for companies operating across multiple countries, entities, and currencies.
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As part of this transition, the Lisk Chain will cease operations on October 31, 2026, with the company encouraging developers and projects currently building on the network to assess their options ahead of the shutdown.
The company wrote via a post on LinkedIn,
“Lisk is becoming the modern money operations platform for finance teams: one workspace for accounts, payments, and approvals across entities, jurisdictions, and rails. The shift brings implications for the Lisk chain.”
The strategic shift means the Lisk Chain will no longer remain at the centre of the company’s long-term product direction. To support projects that may be affected, an optional migration path to Celo has been established for decentralised applications (dApps) and developers currently deployed on or building on Lisk.
The migration is open to all projects, but developers are not required to move to Celo. Instead, each project will need to determine whether the network fits its product, user base, infrastructure, and technical requirements.
For projects that choose Celo, the Celo Core Co. team has prepared resources to help developers deploy their applications and establish themselves within the ecosystem.
The process begins with projects submitting a brief overview covering their deployment status, smart contract addresses, active users or liquidity, and key infrastructure dependencies.
The Celo team will then review submissions individually and work with each project to determine the most appropriate migration strategy.
Importantly, the Lisk Chain will remain fully operational and supported until the scheduled shutdown date, giving developers time to evaluate the migration option and make preparations before the network shuts down.
The development represents a major transition for Lisk, moving its focus away from operating a dedicated blockchain toward financial infrastructure aimed at helping businesses manage money and payments more efficiently.
Live since 2016, Lisk operated as the modern money operations platform for businesses. Finance and operations teams use Lisk to run accounts, payments, and approvals in one workspace, moving money across fiat and stablecoin rails.
Lisk’s decision to wind down its blockchain in 2026 marks the end of a decade-long chapter for one of the earliest projects to emerge from Switzerland’s crypto ecosystem.
Founded by Max Kordek and Oliver Beddows in Zug, Switzerland, Lisk was created with an ambitious goal: to make blockchain development more accessible by allowing developers to build applications using familiar programming languages such as JavaScript.
One of its most significant technological achievements came in 2018 with the launch of the Lisk SDK. The software development kit was designed to make blockchain application development easier by giving developers modular tools for creating their own blockchain applications.
By focusing on JavaScript, Lisk attempted to lower the technical barrier that had traditionally made blockchain development accessible mainly to developers familiar with specialized blockchain programming environments.
Lisk continued upgrading its underlying technology. In 2021, protocol upgrades introduced a new address system and a Byzantine Fault Tolerance mechanism for block finalization, alongside improvements to the peer-to-peer network, consensus mechanism, and transaction-fee structure. These changes were aimed at improving security, scalability, and transaction efficiency.
The project later underwent another major transformation. After operating for years as an independent Layer-1 blockchain, Lisk announced in 2023 that it would migrate toward the Ethereum ecosystem as a Layer-2 network, using Optimism’s OP Stack. The move was particularly notable because Lisk described itself as the first Layer-1 blockchain to make such a transition.
According to DeFiLlama, a blockchain analytics platform, Lisk’s blockchain had over $139,000 in total value locked (TVL)—the value of digital assets deposited in Lisk’s decentralised applications on the network.
Since January 2026, its TVL has steadily declined from $5.47 million, showing how sharply activity and liquidity on the blockchain have contracted. The current level is also the lowest since at least 2024.
The blockchain currently holds over $587,000 in stablecoins. Decentralised exchange trading volume was about $1,700 over the latest 24 hours, while the network generated about $3.88 in fees, underscoring the little capital flow and economic activity the blockchain is currently supporting.
The company’s pivot comes less than a year after blockchain founder Max Kordek returned as chief executive officer in December 2025 and began consolidating Lisk’s operations around a single focus.
Notably, Lisk’s shutdown isn’t a disappearance of the brand but a significant change in direction.
After roughly a decade of experimenting with blockchain, the company is effectively closing one chapter to build an entirely different product around a problem its founders say they encountered firsthand: managing money across modern, globally distributed businesses.