Lisk is shutting down its blockchain on October 31 2026 bringing an abrupt end to a strategy that had increasingly positioned Africa and other emerging markets at the centre of its growth plans.
The Swiss blockchain project had made a significant push into emerging markets, including launching a $15 million fund in 2025 to back Web3 startups across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Lisk said the fund was aimed at finding companies solving real-world problems rather than funding speculative projects, targeting what it described as a largely overlooked emerging-market opportunity.
Africa became one of the most visible parts of that strategy.
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Lisk sought to build an ecosystem around startups using blockchain for payments, financial services, and other applications, while partnerships in markets such as Nigeria positioned the network as infrastructure for stablecoins and local-currency access. In February 2026, Nigerian crypto exchange, Quidax, partnered with Lisk to give developers access to stablecoins and local currencies through its infrastructure.
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That investment is now effectively being wound down.
Lisk says its Ethereum Layer-2 network has failed to generate enough revenue after about two and a half years while ecosystem incentives and the cost of maintaining the network contributed to an unsustainable model. The company is therefore abandoning the blockchain business and moving toward a financial-operations platform for businesses focused on bank accounts, stablecoins, payments, and money management.
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THE LISK CHAIN IS WINDING DOWN
The #Ethereum L2 layer has also proposed the cessation of the #LISKDAO.@Lisk says the ‘Lisk Chain has been struggling with generating enough revenue that can flow back to the LSK token, and ecosystem incentives paid in LSK tokens have… pic.twitter.com/kPGCx8pfcg
— BitKE (@BitcoinKE) August 26, 2026
The reversal is particularly notable because Lisk had only recently doubled down on emerging markets. Its $15 million fund was launched less than a year ago with a mandate covering Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. The project had presented the strategy as a way to capture opportunities that traditional venture capital was missing in these markets.
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The shutdown also comes after Lisk had already abandoned its original Layer-1 blockchain and rebuilt as an Ethereum Layer-2 in late 2023. The network being closed is therefore itself a relatively young iteration of the project.
For Africa’s crypto industry, the episode highlights a broader problem:
Capital entering emerging markets does not necessarily translate into durable blockchain infrastructure. Lisk invested heavily in building an ecosystem around African and other emerging-market startups, but ultimately concluded that running its own blockchain could not produce an economically sustainable business.
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The company will now move in the opposite direction – away from operating a blockchain and toward using existing financial and blockchain infrastructure to provide business finance tools.
The Lisk DAO is also considering burning 100 million LSK, reducing the token’s total supply from 400 million to 300 million, while LSK holders on the Lisk Chain will need to migrate their tokens before the network closes.
For African Web3 founders, the significance goes beyond Lisk itself. One of the projects that had made some of the clearest financial commitments to building an emerging-market blockchain ecosystem is now retreating from the infrastructure it had spent years promoting.
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