Mint Blockchain: The NFT Network That Shut Down After Two Years

On 17 April 2026, Mint Blockchain told its users on X that its network had "officially ceased operations" that day. Anyone with money still on it had six months to move it out. After 20 October 2026, the notice said, the assets "will no longer be processed or recoverable." No reason was given. Twenty-three months earlier, in May 2024, Mint had launched with $5 million of seed funding and a promise to become the home of NFTs on Ethereum.

The numbers explain what the notice did not. L2BEAT, a public service that tracks networks of this kind, put the value of all the coins held on Mint at a peak of about $6.4 million on 10 March 2025. On the day of the shutdown it was about $645,000. DefiLlama, which tracks money held in apps, showed about $17,000 in Mint's apps the day before the announcement. The network's fee revenue peaked at about $22,800 in a single day in September 2024, according to DefiLlama. A year later it was earning a few dollars a day. Across its whole life it took in about $700,000.

What Mint was

Ethereum is the second-largest crypto network, a shared public ledger on which programs can hold and move money by themselves. It is also slow and, at busy times, expensive, like a motorway whose toll rises with the traffic. A "layer 2" is a faster side road built on top of it. Transactions happen cheaply on the side road and are bundled up and recorded on Ethereum in batches, a little like a broker that nets out its clients' trades during the day and settles the totals with the exchange at night.

Mint was a layer 2 built for one thing: NFTs. An NFT is a token that records who owns a specific digital item, usually a picture, much like a numbered certificate in a public register. Creating an NFT is called minting, which is where the network got its name. Mint was launched by NFTScan Labs, a company that runs a search engine for NFT data, together with a developer team called MintCore. CoinMarketCap's project page says work began in October 2023. The mainnet, the live network that handles real money, went live on 14 May 2024.

Mint did not write its own engine. It used the OP Stack, free software published by the Optimism Collective, the group behind the Optimism network, and joined Optimism's "Superchain", a family of networks built from the same parts. Coinbase's Base network is the best-known member. The launch press release called Mint a strategic partner of the Optimism Foundation in the Asia-Pacific region.

Built for a market that was leaving

The plan was to win NFT creators and collectors with cheap fees and tools made for them: one-click minting, collection pages, and .mint domain names. Users were encouraged to earn points by moving money onto the network, minting a commemorative NFT and completing tasks, in the hope of a free share of a future token.

In February 2025 the project published plans for its token, MINT. It said 1 billion would ever exist, with 50% for a Mint DAO (a fund run by token-holder votes, a little like a shareholder vote), 12% for free handouts to users, 20% for early backers and 18% for the team. Price data shown by the exchange MEXC put MINT's all-time high at about 8 cents. By December 2025 it was about 0.4 cents, a fall of about 95%.

The timing was poor. The NFT boom of 2021 had long ended by the time Mint launched, and the brief recovery of 2024 faded. Specialised networks found they were competing with Base, Arbitrum and Optimism, which already had the users and the money. Mint's peak of $6.4 million was small change next to Blast, another Ethereum add-on network, whose apps held $2.26 billion at their peak and which announced its own closure in October 2026.

Getting the money out

Mint promised an orderly exit. Users could withdraw four assets: ether (ETH), Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC, a token that tracks the price of bitcoin) and the digital dollars USDC and USDT. Withdrawals went through a "bridge", the connection that moves coins between a layer 2 and Ethereum, and were processed in weekly batches that could take up to ten days to arrive. imToken, a popular wallet app, warned users that requests filed in the last days might not finish in time.

Two details made the exit less simple than it looked. First, NFTs were not on the withdrawal list. The pictures themselves are usually stored elsewhere, often on IPFS, a shared file-storage network where a file survives only as long as someone keeps a copy, but the record of who owns them lived on Mint. When the network stops, that record stops working: no sales, no transfers, no royalties for artists. Second, L2BEAT noted that an update on 24 April 2026 gave the bridge contracts emergency functions that can move all remaining ETH and tokens to an address controlled by Mint's multisig, a shared account that needs several team members to sign. That is a common tool for a final clean-up. It also means that what happens to money left behind after 20 October depends on the team.

L2BEAT had already flagged a weakness in the design. Like many networks of its type, Mint did not use "fault proofs", the system that lets outsiders challenge a wrong record, and relied on the honesty of a small group of approved operators.

A quiet death in a crowded graveyard

Mint is not a scandal. Nobody is accused of taking user money, and the team kept the exit open for six months. But it is part of a pattern. The crypto site Bex.co counted more than 20 crypto projects closing in the first quarter of 2026 alone, including the NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway and the exchange Bit.com. In October 2026, Blast and Abstract, two far larger Ethereum add-on networks, announced they were shutting down too.

The lesson for collectors is plain. An NFT is only as permanent as the network that records it. When a small network turns off, the picture may survive somewhere, but the proof of ownership does not.