PANews reported on January 16th that MilkyWay, a liquidity staking protocol, announced its impending closure and permanent shutdown. The main reasons cited were: the market demand upon which its core business relied failed to meet expectations; DeFi activities within the Celestia ecosystem did not experience explosive growth; the restaking boom subsided briefly; the tokenization of real-world assets was unexpectedly hampered; and the later shift towards card-based products failed to achieve product-market fit due to insufficient funding and time.
The next step for the protocol will be to automatically distribute accumulated fees (in USDC) proportionally to eligible MILK holders based on a snapshot taken at 10:00 UTC on January 14th. Users will not need to manually claim these fees. All liquidity staking functionality is now unavailable, and existing positions will be automatically unstaking. The protocol will eventually cease maintaining all services and burn any remaining tokens. The team is committed to completing the entire shutdown process in a transparent and responsible manner.


