Blockfrost Remains Online After Cardano Treasury Proposal Expires

Cardano developers can continue using Blockfrost after its Treasury proposal expired on July 28 without ratification. The governance outcome ended the proposed 18-month transition into community ownership, while Hoskinson’s intervention removed the prospect of an immediate service shutdown.

Blockfrost remains available, but its long-term funding, ownership and operating model no longer have an approved implementation path.

Blockfrost Proposal Expires Below DRep Threshold

The governance action, titled “Blockfrost’s transformation to not-for-profit,” was submitted on June 26 and expired on July 28, the date Epoch 646 began.

The proposal requested 9,832,979 ADA to fund 18 months of operations and transfer Blockfrost’s source code, trademarks, domains and infrastructure into an independent nonprofit governed by the Cardano community.

Final tracker data recorded approximately ₳1.51 billion in yes stake and ₳1.98 billion in total no stake, leaving DRep support at about 43.3%, below the required 67% threshold. Six Constitutional Committee members supported the action, while one did not vote.

Without sufficient DRep approval, the proposal expired without ratification. No Treasury funds were released, and the planned nonprofit transfer received no governance mandate.

Blockfrost Hosted API Continues Operating

Hoskinson addressed the result in a video published after voting closed, confirming that Blockfrost would not be shut down immediately.

“I’m not going to shut anything down right now.”

He added that he would work with the Blockfrost team to preserve continuity and publish further information once a path forward has been established. No shutdown date, endpoint deprecation schedule or migration deadline was announced.

Blockfrost provides a hosted REST API that allows developers to read Cardano blockchain data and submit transactions without maintaining their own Cardano node and indexing infrastructure. Applications can use the service to retrieve address balances, UTxO data, native assets, blocks and transaction information.

According to the formal proposal, Blockfrost processed more than 1.84 billion API requests and delivered over seven terabytes of data during its latest measured month. The proposal also reported that more than half of Cardano transactions are submitted through Blockfrost during most epochs.

Hoskinson identified Coinbase, Binance, Kraken and Lace among the services using the infrastructure, although the current extent of each integration has not been publicly detailed. A sudden shutdown could require affected exchanges, wallets and decentralized applications to migrate to another provider or operate their own infrastructure.

Cardano API Funding and Ownership Remain Unresolved

Keeping the hosted API online does not activate any part of the expired Treasury proposal. Blockfrost remains under its existing ownership, the planned community board will not be formed under the proposed schedule, and the infrastructure will not be transferred into community stewardship through this governance action.

The proposed sustainability model would have preserved a free public API while allowing a future community board to evaluate commercial services or a vendor-supported operating structure. Revenue from paid services, vendor participation or service agreements could then have contributed to the cost of maintaining the public infrastructure.

Hoskinson did not announce an alternative funding source, revised governance action, replacement budget or period for which the existing service can be maintained.

Current Blockfrost integrations can continue operating, and developers have not been given a migration deadline. What expired on July 28 was not the API itself, but the only published plan to fund its transition into community ownership. Blockfrost remains online without the Treasury allocation, nonprofit handover and scheduled community board that the proposal was designed to establish.