When we opened Abstract’s migration page on 9 October 2026, a counter was running there: “Chain Shutdown in 66d”. Below it, the sentence that anyone who does not get their funds off the chain by 15 December will lose access to them. It is worth picturing that calmly. Someone has an accident and spends eight weeks in hospital. Someone takes a sabbatical, is on parental leave, or is so deep in a crisis at work that they do not open a crypto app for two or three months. At a bank or a regulated exchange, the money is still there afterwards. On Abstract it is gone.

That is not bad luck for a few individual users but a property of the system. And it is reason to ask again a question the crypto market likes to treat as settled: what exactly…