[Acala and Karura Propose Shutting Down Their Chains on February 10, 2027; Most Early Polkadot Parachains Share the Same Fate] BlockBeats reports that on November 11th, the Acala team officially submitted on-chain governance proposal Referendum 195, proposing an orderly shutdown (sunset) of the Acala network on Polkadot. Simultaneously, its sister chain Karura on Kusama launched its corresponding Referendum 137. If both referendums pass, both chains will cease block production on February 10, 2027, ending approximately seven years of operation. In an open letter to the community, the team explicitly stated that the reason is the consistently insufficient DeFi liquidity depth in the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems, further fragmented by the multi-parachain structure, with operating costs exceeding revenue, making continued operation unsustainable. According to the proposal, if passed, users must withdraw their external assets, including DOT, KSM, and USDT and USDC borrowed via cross-chain bridges, by February 10, 2027. Liquidity staking products have earlier deadlines: LDOT bound to validators must begin unlocking by December 16, 2026; ordinary LDOT must apply for unbinding by January 12, 2027; and LKSM must be unbound by February 2, 2027. Native tokens ACA and KAR cannot be withdrawn across chains and will remain permanently on their respective chains. The team promises to continue running collator and RPC nodes and holding valid coretime until the deadline to ensure smooth exit channels. After the deadline, they will make every effort to return remaining external assets to the corresponding addresses on Polkadot or Kusama Asset Hub, but do not guarantee a full return. External assets in the treasury are planned to be donated to the corresponding relay chain treasury. The referendum is still ongoing and is a semaphore vote; its final implementation depends on the holders' wishes. Looking back at the five winners of the first Polkadot parachain auction in 2021—Acala, Moonbeam, Astar, Parallel Finance, and Clover—most have now essentially exited or stalled. Moonbeam officially stopped block production around July 31, 2026, and migrated its token GLMR to Base; Parallel Finance gradually shut down its products on Polkadot and Kusama after a security incident, and its on-chain infrastructure is no longer functioning properly, requiring users to manually check their balances through a legacy interface; Clover has also transformed or left its original parachain identity. Currently, among the first auction winners, Astar is the main one actively maintaining and continuously upgrading its runtime. The core goal of Polkadot's creation was to solve the problem of balancing scalability, interoperability, and security faced by the blockchain ecosystem at the time. Single chains like Ethereum had bottlenecks in throughput, while cross-chain operations relied on centralized bridges or complex relays, and security was difficult to guarantee uniformly. However, as time went on, the high barriers to entry and capital lock-up brought about by the auction model, the fragmentation of ecosystem liquidity, and the intensification of external competition made it difficult for many parachains to form a sufficiently deep market. Polkadot has now shifted to the Agile Coretime model, selling block space in a more flexible way and promoting architectural upgrades such as JAM, but the successive exits of early flagship projects have also made the outside world re-examine the challenges of this multi-chain vision in practice.