Silicon Network, an Ethereum layer 2 built on Polygon's CDK and tied to the South Korean exchange Korbit, has begun shutting down. The team opened a withdrawal window on September 2 and set a hard cutoff of December 31. After that date the chain and its block explorer go dark, and roughly 9.75 million dollars in user assets still sitting on the network could become far harder to recover.
The figure comes from L2Beat, which tracks value locked across rollups. Most of it is not dust. The largest balances are stablecoins and wrapped tokens that belong to real users who simply have not moved them yet.
What is still stranded on Silicon Network
Here is the breakdown of what remained onchain when the shutdown was announced, according to L2Beat data cited by CryptoSlate.
| Asset | Value still onchain |
|---|---|
| USDC | 2.66 million dollars |
| WBTC | 2.54 million dollars |
| ETH | 2.08 million dollars |
| USDT | 1.85 million dollars |
None of it is locked by the protocol. Silicon is a non-custodial network, so each holder controls their own withdrawal. The danger is not a freeze. It is inertia. A wallet left untouched past New Year's Eve loses the easy path out once the official bridge and interface stop running.
A pattern, not a one-off
Silicon Network was meant to pull Korbit's Korean user base onto Ethereum. That effort lasted less than two years, and Korbit is now retiring the Web3 wallet that ran on the chain. The closure lands in the middle of a wider shakeout, as smaller general-purpose layer 2s struggle to hold enough activity to justify running their own infrastructure.
The contrast this week is sharp. While Silicon Network empties out, Robinhood's own chain was closing in on a billion dollars in value locked. The gap shows how concentrated the layer 2 race has become, and how fast value can drain from a chain that loses its sponsor. It also feeds a longer debate about how L2 value even gets measured and whether Ethereum's fragmented layer-2 economy can support the dozens of chains now chasing the same users.
Silicon is not the first network to hand its users a countdown. When TON moved to shut down its only bridge, holders faced the same scramble to move funds before a deadline. Korbit users now have until December 31 to bridge their balances to Ethereum mainnet or another chain, and the team has urged them to act well before the window closes. Withdrawals route through the network's bridge while it stays live, and once the interface is gone, pulling funds out would mean relying on lower level tools that most holders never touch.