Blockchains Abandoned by Their Developers
From time to time, users contact rabbit.io support with the same question: “I want to swap BNB, but my address starts with bnb1…” This means one thing: their funds are on the BNB Beacon Chain.
Not long ago, this blockchain was the foundation of Binance’s decentralized finance architecture. Today, it simply does not work. At all. New blocks can no longer be created, which means there is nowhere to record a transaction. It makes no difference what asset is stuck there — BNB itself or BEP2 tokens that were once issued on this chain. Without blocks, they are effectively frozen in place.
Imagine buying property in a fast-growing city that was supposed to become a major business hub. Sounds like a great investment, right?
Some people actually move there, while you decide to hold the property for the long term. Then one day, the developers announce they are abandoning the project and stopping construction. Residents leave. Years later, you return to check on your investment and realize the painful truth: no one needs this property anymore.
Worse still, you cannot even sell it for a symbolic price. Not legally, not technically. There is no longer any registry where property ownership can be recorded.
Some blockchains turn into ghost cities once their developers announce the end of support. But not all of them do.
In some cases, the city does not die. Most of its residents may leave, yet those who remain keep the infrastructure running. The “transport system” still works — assets can be moved from one address to another. The “delivery services” are still in place. Even the legal system continues to function: property can still be sold, and ownership records are properly registered.
Let’s take a walk through abandoned and half-abandoned blockchain cities and try to understand why life comes to a complete stop in some of them, while in others the local community keeps the city alive.
Binance Chain (BNB Beacon Chain)
Binance Chain was the first blockchain built by Binance. It was fast and powered Binance DEX. However, in decentralized finance, the Ethereum Virtual Machine eventually became the de facto standard. Blockchains that were incompatible with EVM faced a serious problem: application developers had to invest significant effort to port their products.
At the time — in 2020 and 2021 — developers had no incentive to do that. User demand was already overwhelming, and the market had no shortage of platforms that supported EVM natively. As a result, it was blockchain developers, not application teams, who had to make compromises.
Binance was no exception. The company launched its own EVM-compatible network, Binance Smart Chain. Initially, it was positioned as a sidechain of the original Binance Chain, designed specifically to support complex smart contracts. Over time, however, almost all activity migrated there. Maintaining two blockchains no longer made sense — it added unnecessary complexity and confusion.
Eventually, Binance Smart Chain was rebranded as BNB Chain, while the original Binance Chain was renamed BNB Beacon Chain. At that point, the naming itself made the old chain look like a sidechain.
Binance later announced a gradual shutdown of BNB Beacon Chain. And on December 3, 2024, block production stopped. From that moment on, no new blocks could be created. Unsurprisingly, this was bad news for anyone whose assets were still stored on addresses within that network.
Still, BNB Beacon Chain is not the worst-case scenario. Some assets can actually be recovered. If you hold BNB or BEP2 tokens for which an equivalent exists on the modern BNB Chain, and cross-chain features are enabled, you can use a special recovery page on bnbchain.org to receive BNB or BEP20 tokens on the active network.
But there are blockchains where nothing like this is possible anymore.
Neo Legacy
The Chinese “Ethereum killer” ran into the same problem Binance did: blockchains that do not support the EVM struggle to attract developers. Just like BNB Chain, Neo existed in two parallel versions for a long time — the new Neo N3, where everyone was encouraged to move, and the old Neo Legacy, where more stubborn users remained.
The developers initially promised to support the legacy network for a year. Later, they extended that deadline. But this could not go on forever.
On October 31, 2025, the switch was finally flipped. The network was stopped. Blocks were no longer produced. Anyone who failed to move their assets via the official migration bridge before the deadline found themselves trapped inside a dead blockchain.
In theory, those users could now be saved only by the developers’ goodwill — through a manual, off-chain swap. In practice, this is unlikely. The team had already extended the deadlines more than once, and there is little reason to expect further intervention.
This is an important lesson. If BNB Beacon Chain were to follow the same path — and its developers may well decide to do so one day — your “ghost city” would not only be abandoned, but also completely cut off from the outside world.
HECO Chain
HECO (Huobi Eco Chain) was another exchange-backed blockchain — this time launched by Huobi, which is now known as HTX. Like BNB Chain, it emerged during the DeFi boom, when every major exchange felt compelled to build its own blockchain.
Later, however, Huobi was acquired by Justin Sun. New management came in, priorities shifted toward TRON and BTTC, and HECO was left behind.
The development team did not give users much time to deal with their assets. The shutdown was announced on November 24, 2024. By January 15, 2025, everything was gone.
There is no official website anymore. No explorers. No infrastructure. The only remaining trace of how the network once worked is the project’s GitHub repository, whose last commit is dated August 15, 2022.
How were these blockchains killed?
The stories of HECO Chain, Neo Legacy, and BNB Beacon Chain highlight a fundamental problem with centralized, corporate blockchains: without corporate backing, they simply cease to exist.
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There is a profound difference between how blocks are produced in networks like Bitcoin and how consensus works in more centralized systems. In Bitcoin, even when the original developer abandons the project — which is effectively what happened with Satoshi Nakamoto — neither the developer nor anyone else can shut it down. That is decentralization: the absence of a single point of failure.
Even if Satoshi Nakamoto were to return, patent the technology, and demand that everything be turned off, there would still be at least one anonymous miner quietly producing blocks somewhere. And as long as that is the case, the blockchain remains alive.
The architecture of the blockchains discussed above was fundamentally different. They were all governed by a closed club. Block production was not open to everyone, but restricted to a small, pre-approved set of validators — often called consensus nodes.
Neo is a perfect illustration of this. The network had only seven validators, five of which were controlled by the Neo Foundation or its affiliated partners.
The consensus rules required two-thirds of validators to agree in order to produce a block. On October 31, 2025, the Neo Foundation shut down its servers. As a result, the remaining independent nodes — if any were still running — could no longer reach quorum. If five out of seven validators “leave the chat”, block production stops.
Why didn’t the community step in and spin up new nodes? Because it was impossible. In networks like this, you cannot simply connect a node and start producing blocks. Existing validators must first vote to admit a new validator into the active set. And since the Neo Foundation controlled most of the votes, no “blockchain rescuers” would ever have been allowed into the validator set before the shutdown.
BNB Beacon Chain followed the same pattern. It had three times more validators, but they were selected by Binance’s management. That made them just as easy to turn off. Even if you were running a full node on your own computer, it would now sit there forever, waiting for the next block that will never arrive.
This is not a democracy where the network’s fate is decided by its users. It is a corporate product. Decentralization ends where a developer-controlled validator list begins. If that list is short and its members are affiliated with each other, the blockchain can be switched off.
Could It Be Different?
Yes — in blockchains where anyone can participate in block production.
I already mentioned Bitcoin, whose creator left the project many years ago. As long as miners remain incentivized to search for new blocks, they will continue doing so, and the Bitcoin blockchain will not stop. Today, that incentive is purely economic: a substantial block reward. While the reward is regularly reduced through halvings, Bitcoin’s price has just as regularly climbed to new multi-year highs roughly every four years. For that reason alone, shutting Bitcoin down is unlikely anytime soon.
Another example is Dogecoin, which celebrated its 12th anniversary this week. Its creator, Billy Markus, left the project long ago. More than that, he has repeatedly said that the joke has gone on for too long and that there is no real reason to keep mining DOGE. Yet Dogecoin has an active community of supporters — including, famously, Elon Musk.
For many years, Dogecoin has maintained a market share of over 50% of the entire memecoin sector. On top of that, its mining mechanism allows DOGE to be mined together with Litecoin. In other words, no additional mining costs are required. Given that, why would miners stop?
Or consider Ethereum Classic. Back in 2016, the Ethereum Foundation declared that the original chain should no longer be developed and proposed a new, “correct” one instead. But some disagreed with the idea that the Ethereum Foundation — or anyone else — had the authority to decide which chain was legitimate and which was not.
Code is law. The code of the original chain had not been violated, so it deserved to continue. And continue it did. In defiance of the developers and even against the choice of the majority of users who followed the fork, Ethereum Classic has remained alive and active.
Kadena provides another interesting example. The project was a startup founded by former J.P. Morgan developers, who announced in October 2025 that they were discontinuing work on the blockchain due to “market conditions”. The project’s GitHub repository even contains a note stating that the network stopped on November 15, 2025.
And yet Kadena is a Proof-of-Work blockchain, supported by a network of miners. As long as there are people willing to mine it, declaring the blockchain dead is premature. Anyone can open a block explorer and see that blocks continue to appear regularly. Admittedly, almost all of them are empty.
Finally, there is an especially strange case. Remember the collapse of the Terra/Luna ecosystem? It was one of the most dramatic events in the history of the cryptocurrency industry. Many crypto enthusiasts lost significant amounts of money. It seemed obvious that no one would ever be interested in the blockchain where all of this had happened.
And yet, that is exactly what happened. Do Kwon abandoned the network and moved on to build a new one, but blocks on the old chain are still being produced. People refused to accept its death. They self-organized, selected new validators, and continued developing the blockchain. Why? Most likely for purely speculative reasons. Luna Classic has effectively turned into a memecoin. People trade it not for its technology, but as a lottery ticket. And the demand is far from negligible: LUNC is available for exchange on rabbit.io, and I can see that demand in practice.
How to Tell If a Blockchain Is at Risk of Becoming a Ghost
All of these examples show that the risk of turning into a “ghost city” is highest for blockchains where participation in block production requires approval from an “administration” — whether that administration takes the form of developers, a foundation, or the current set of validators.
There are many such networks. Ripple, Stellar, Hedera Hashgraph, Tron, and a number of other company-driven blockchains fall into this category.
But even when a network formally allows anyone to become a validator, that does not always mean independent participation exists in practice. In some cases, the economic barrier is so high that almost no independent validators ever appear.
I recently wrote about this issue in the context of Hyperliquid. In that network, one can enter the active validator set only by locking more than $66 million worth of HYPE tokens. As a general rule, the active validator set consists of the 24 candidates with the largest stake.
Is it rational to lock up such an amount if the development team can afford to lock up even more and simply push you out of the validator set? Especially given that the team spends almost all of its revenue buying HYPE tokens, steadily increasing its overall holdings with every new block.
The same logic applies to any blockchain with similar rules, particularly when a large portion of the staking token supply is concentrated in the hands of the developers.
BNB Chain is another vivid example. The team behind it already has experience shutting down a blockchain. Would they do it again if necessary? Impossible to say. Would they do it under business pressure? Or after exiting the business entirely? History suggests that they very well might. Many crypto companies eventually shut down — even industry leaders.
For blockchains whose fate is ultimately decided by a single company, I would be cautious about holding assets long term. That does not mean such assets should never be held at all. But if you do hold them, you need to follow project news closely in order not to miss a shutdown announcement and to have time to exchange assets into something else.
The steady flow of support requests to rabbit.io from users asking whether it is still possible to swap BNB from the long-defunct BNB Beacon Chain shows just how many people fail to keep track of such developments.
For long-term storage, decentralized blockchains are a much better fit — networks that cannot be switched off, even if their developers decide to walk away.
