Sablier

Sablier is a permissionless token distribution protocol that enabled continuous, per-second token vesting and Merkle-based instant airdrops across EVM chains and Solana. The company entered maintenance mode in July 2026 and is winding down by June 2028; no new streams or campaigns can be created on Solana.

What Is Sablier

Sablier is a token distribution protocol designed to replace periodic batch unlocks with continuous onchain transfers. Rather than releasing tokens to employees, grant recipients, or airdrop beneficiaries in monthly or quarterly chunks, Sablier streams tokens second by second, with recipients able to withdraw their vested share at any time without waiting for sender action.

The protocol launched on Ethereum in June 2019, making it the first token streaming primitive in the EVM ecosystem. It was co-founded by Paul Razvan Berg and raised backing from a16z Crypto, alongside A Capital, Factor, and GD1.

Core Mechanism

Sablier's central construct is the stream: a funded onchain account where time itself determines how much of a deposit belongs to the recipient versus the sender. As seconds elapse, ownership of locked tokens continuously shifts from sender to recipient at whatever rate the schedule specifies. Recipients withdraw at will; senders can cancel early and recover unstreamed funds subject to the stream's cancellability setting.

On EVM chains the protocol offered two product families:

• Lockup: Fixed-term vesting contracts with a range of distribution curve shapes including linear, cliff-linear, monthly discrete, timelock, and custom exponential or stepped curves. Lockup positions are represented as NFTs, making them transferable on secondary markets.
• Flow: Open-ended streams with no fixed endpoint, targeting recurring payroll and ongoing grants.

EVM deployments covered 24 chains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Avalanche, Polygon, BNB Chain, zkSync Era, Scroll, and Linea.

Sablier on Solana

Sablier expanded to Solana in September 2025 through a program suite branded SolSab. The Solana implementation was intentionally narrower than the EVM version, reflecting the different account model and token standards.

SolSab shipped two protocols:

Lockup: A vesting program where the sender deposits SPL tokens or Token2022 tokens into a dedicated stream Associated Token Account (ATA). Ownership shifts to the recipient per second according to a linear or timelock schedule. Streams are transferable; non-transferable streams were not supported. The Solana version omitted hook functionality available on EVM for cancel and withdraw events.

Merkle Instant: An airdrop program using Merkle Tree proofs. Campaign organizers upload a distribution list and recipients claim their full allocation by submitting a Merkle proof with no vesting schedule and immediate receipt of the full allocation upon claim.

The Solana application was accessible at solana.sablier.com.

Security and Audits

Sablier's EVM smart contracts accumulated a multi-year security track record from 2019 onward, with the team citing audit coverage as a core differentiator over manual vesting scripts. Specific published audit reports for the SolSab Solana programs are not available in publicly accessible documentation.

Team and History

Sablier Labs was co-founded by Paul Razvan Berg and operated since mid-2019, positioning itself as the originator of the token streaming category on Ethereum. Investors included a16z Crypto, A Capital, Factor, and GD1.

The team shipped steady protocol upgrades through early 2026: VCAs and Lockup v4.0 in March 2026, price-gated ETH timelocks in the same month, USDC self-checkout billing in March, and AI agent skills for automated vesting management in May 2026.

Maintenance Mode and Wind-Down

On July 13, 2026, Sablier Labs announced it was entering maintenance mode and would wind down by June 2028. Co-founder Paul Razvan Berg explained the team had found no longer venture-scale business in onchain streamed payments. Contributing factors included a difficult first quarter in which customers postponed token launches due to market conditions, and the emergence of AI-assisted coding tools that lowered the barrier to replicating the protocol's capabilities competitively.

The Solana-specific wind-down preceded the broader announcement: by June 2026, the Solana interface had already been scaled back to a claiming-only application. Creating new streams or airdrop campaigns on Solana is explicitly no longer supported. The underlying Solana programs remain deployed and open source.

As part of the transition, Sablier accelerated its licensing change from BUSL to GPL effective immediately, originally planned for 2029, permitting anyone to fork and redeploy the contracts freely.

Existing streams across all chains continue to operate. The protocol's permissionless contracts do not depend on Sablier Labs infrastructure, so vesting schedules in progress will complete normally. The main frontend application will receive official support through June 2028, after which it moves to community stewardship as an open-source public good.