Sablier (sablier.com) is a token-streaming protocol: instead of paying a lump sum, a sender locks ERC-20 tokens in a smart contract that releases them to the recipient continuously, second by second, over a set period. It is widely recognised as the first token-streaming protocol on Ethereum, and it is the reference primitive for the pattern DAOs reach for constantly – vesting a contributor grant, paying an ongoing salary, or distributing an airdrop that unlocks over time rather than all at once.
The concept predates the protocol. In November 2018 Sablier co-founder Paul Razvan Berg published ERC-1620, “Money Streaming” – a standard for representing continuous payments on-chain, where a locked balance is released to a recipient at a fixed rate per unit of time. Berg and co-founder Gabriel Apostu then built the first implementation, deploying it to Ethereum mainnet in December 2019. Sablier frames this as “real-time finance”: the passage of time itself is the settlement mechanism, so a stream needs no trusted intermediary to meter out the drip – the contract simply makes the vested portion withdrawable as the clock advances.
The V2 architecture splits the protocol into distinct, single-purpose product lines:
Because the contracts are non-upgradeable and permissionless, anyone can create a stream with any ERC-20 on any supported chain, and no admin can alter a stream after the fact.
Streaming solves a governance problem, not just a payments one. A DAO that votes a contributor a twelve-month grant does not want to hand over the whole sum on day one – that is a trust and alignment risk. Streaming the grant means the recipient earns it as they keep working, and (with a cancelable stream) a governance vote can stop the unvested remainder if the relationship ends.
The same logic covers contributor compensation, team and investor token unlocks, and airdrops designed to reward continued participation rather than an instant flip. By its own reporting Sablier has served over 297,000 users and 550,000+ streams, moving billions in cumulative volume – it sits alongside Safe and the rest of the tooling stack as core treasury infrastructure. The continuous, open-ended counterpart is Superfluid, which streams money per-second with no escrowed pot – the two are the escrowed-vesting and live-netflow poles of on-chain streaming.
On 13 July 2026 Sablier Labs announced it was entering maintenance mode and halting active development. Berg pointed to a sharp Q1-2026 drop in usage as customers postponed token launches, and to AI-assisted coding making it cheap for competitors to clone the product, concluding there was no venture-scale business in onchain streaming. The move is instructive for anyone relying on DAO tooling: the company stopped, but the protocol did not. The immutable, permissionless contracts keep running with no operator, existing streams and vesting plans are unaffected, the hosted frontend is committed through June 2028 before becoming a community-run public good, and Sablier said it would accelerate the licence flip that turns its Business Source License contracts into GPL. Depending on a contract that outlives its company is exactly what “permissionless” is supposed to buy. The licence half landed the same day, as an on-chain write rather than a commit.
Sablier’s EVM contracts live in sablier-labs/evm-monorepo, which is where the older sablier-labs/lockup path now redirects, and the repository’s LICENSE.md still opens “The primary contracts are licensed under the Business Source License 1.1 (BUSL-1.1)”. BUSL is a delayed-open licence: it grants copying, modification and non-production use at once, requires a commercial licence for production use, and converts to a named Change License on a Change Date. Sablier’s LICENSE-BUSL.md names GPL-3.0-or-later as the Change License and sets the Change Date to “the earlier of 2029-07-01 or the ISO 8601 date stored in the eth.sablier.license-change-date text record at license-dates.sablier.eth”, wording that commit bd5c831 added on 13 July 2026.
The record was written that afternoon. At 15:05:59 UTC on 13 July 2026, in Ethereum block 25,524,492, a TextChanged event on the name’s resolver (0xf29100983e058b709f3d539b0c765937b804ac15) set it to 2026-07-13, and a read on 26 September 2026 still returns that value. The Change Date has passed, so the contract versions released under that licence text are now available under GPL-3.0-or-later. The BUSL header in LICENSE.md records the terms they were published under; the date is what converted them. A DAO forking or self-hosting Sablier today can do so under the GPL.
This page said the opposite from 20 August to 26 September 2026. It read the text record on sablier.eth and lockup.sablier.eth, found it empty on both, and concluded that the 2029 fallback bound. The licence names a third ENS name, and the date was there. The general rule for any tool that promises to wind down into a public good: read the promise at the exact address the licence gives, because a neighbouring name that returns empty looks the same as a record nobody wrote.
Sablier answers “pay this out gradually over time.” Caper answers a different question – “should the treasury spend at all, and on what?” A caper's treasury releases funds only through proposals that clear a vote, survive the market window that a pass opens, and only then execute a discrete PAYOUT or INVEST action, so every disbursement is a governed, on-the-record decision rather than a continuous drip. The two are complementary: a caper could vote a grant and settle it as a single payout, or a payout could itself fund a Sablier stream for a contributor. Where they differ is emphasis – Caper puts the deliberation and the funding decision on-chain and auditable; Sablier puts the schedule of an already-agreed payment on-chain. Both share the same underlying bet: money movement is safer when the rails, not a person, enforce the terms.