If you hold G tokens, USDC, USDT, WETH, DAI or WBTC on Gravity Alpha Mainnet, you have until 1 November 2026 to get them off the blockchain. Galxe is shutting down its first own network that day. Anything still sitting on it after that can no longer be transferred, the provider says: not a temporary halt, but the end of mobility. Galxe’s own guide therefore explicitly advises bridging balances out before the date.
Two things make that deadline harder than it looks on paper. First, different tokens use different exits, and they are not interchangeable: anyone trying to send USDC over the familiar bridge will not find the balance there at all. Second, the classic route carries a waiting period of roughly seven days. Together that means the real edge in the calendar is not 1 November but a week earlier.
What happens to Gravity Alpha Mainnet on 1 November 2026
Gravity Alpha Mainnet is the older version of the Gravity network and ran as a layer 2, a side chain that draws its security from Ethereum. Galxe launched it in 2024 on the Arbitrum Nitro stack, with chain ID 1625. With Gravity L1, a standalone layer 1 with ID 127001, now in full operation, the Alpha chain has lost its purpose.
The developer documentation now lists the old chain openly as “legacy” and puts a warning in front of it: all balances should be moved back to Ethereum before 1 November. The help pages for end users put the same sentence more plainly. Gravity Alpha Mainnet will remain available until 1 November 2026, it says, after which it will be decommissioned, and whatever is still on it will no longer be transferable.
For holders this is not a price question. G traded at around $0.0041 on Monday evening, its market capitalisation stood at just under $30 million, which places it 524th among crypto assets. The price sits about 82 percent below its February 2025 peak of roughly $0.023. The sums are small for most holders, in other words. The difference between a small amount and a lost amount is the same all the same, and that is the point here.
Why Galxe is switching off its own layer 2
Galxe announced the step back in July. The reasoning: Gravity Alpha was the first stage of its own blockchain plans, carried real traffic and exposed the bottlenecks that mattered when building the new chain. Out of that experience, by the company’s account, came parallel execution of smart contracts, confirmation times below one second and a price oracle that sits directly in the protocol. An oracle is the feed through which a blockchain learns data from outside, such as prices.
Put differently, the Alpha chain was a test rig that has served its purpose. That fits a development we have described several times this year. Blast is being discontinued, Abstract Chain faced the same question in October, Mintchain also set a deadline, and at NEAR it was MyNearWallet that went rather than the chain. The reason is the same in each case: too many side chains compete for too little usage, and whoever runs one pays for every block.
Different tokens, different exits
This is where most of the mistakes happen. Two different kinds of token sit on Gravity Alpha, and they leave the chain by separate routes. What decides is how a token got there in the first place.
Only three assets come out through the official Gravity bridge: the network’s own G, plus DAI and WBTC that were deposited through the standard Arbitrum gateway. For those three the canonical bridge, the exit built into the rollup, is the one that applies.
USDC, USDT and ETH or WETH do not come out there. Those three were issued on Gravity Alpha by Stargate, a service that works with liquidity pools, and not by the standard gateway. The canonical bridge does not know them and cannot process them. The Gravity documentation flags this as a hazard warning and adds a sentence worth taking seriously: no further route will be added. For these three tokens, Stargate is the only exit.
One detail that will otherwise send you down the wrong path: on Stargate, USDC is not called USDC but USDC.e. Search for “USDC” and you may not find your balance and take it for gone. The three assets appear there as USDC.e, USDT and WETH with Gravity as the source network.
The seven days of the canonical bridge
Gravity Alpha was an optimistic rollup. The name describes the procedure: the chain first assumes its settlements are correct, then leaves others a window to object. That window is called the challenge period and runs for roughly seven days on Gravity Alpha. Only after it can you collect a withdrawal on Ethereum.
The documentation therefore says to start well before 1 November so the withdrawal can complete. Do the arithmetic: start on 25 October and the standard route, with its seven-day wait, just fits inside the window. Start on 29 October and that route no longer gets you out.
One more point the help pages set out separately: withdrawals you have already submitted through the canonical bridge continue under the old procedure and cannot be sped up after the fact. A transfer already running on a seven-day clock stays on seven days, even if you hear about the faster route afterwards.
Fast Withdraw: ten minutes instead of seven days
For G there is now a second exit, and Galxe itself calls it the recommended choice. Fast Withdraw sits on the official Gravity bridge and sends G to Ethereum without the seven-day wait. The guide gives about ten minutes as the typical duration.
The process has four stations: open the bridge, connect the wallet, select Fast Withdraw, enter the amount and confirm the withdrawal in the wallet. Once the G tokens have arrived on Ethereum, set the destination to Mainnet and bridge on from Ethereum to Gravity L1. For that second step you need some ETH in the wallet, because the network fee on Ethereum is paid in ETH. That is the item holders of small G balances should price in beforehand: the fee depends on how busy Ethereum is, not on the size of your balance.
Anyone who needs G on Ethereum faster and would rather not take the official route will find a pointer in the documentation to Symbiosis, a liquidity-pool route that works in minutes. The same caution applies as with any pool service: you trade waiting time for trust in one more provider, and you usually pay a discount for it.
Staked G has to come out of staking first
This part is easy to miss and costs the most if you do. The G staking page at Galxe goes with the chain. Staked G cannot be withdrawn afterwards, because the interface for it no longer exists. Anyone with G in staking therefore needs two steps in this order: unstake first, then bridge.
Allow extra time for it. Many staking contracts have a cooldown phase in which a withdrawal is announced but not yet paid out. Check in the interface which period your stake carries before you count on the bridging time. Whether a platform states its withdrawal periods clearly is one of the points our staking comparison looks at, and this case shows why that is no side issue.
The detour via a centralised exchange
If neither the bridge nor the pool route appeals, Galxe’s guide names a third way: an exchange that accepts G deposits directly from Gravity Alpha. OKX and Bitget are named there. The process consists of three stations. You send G from Gravity Alpha to your exchange account, withdraw from the exchange over the Ethereum network to your own wallet, and bridge from there to Gravity L1. Here too you need ETH for the fee on the last step.
The route has one solid advantage: you avoid the waiting period. It also has two drawbacks worth knowing in advance. The deposit address has to support the Alpha chain, and it has to still support it when you send. Exchanges often close deposits for a chain before it is switched off. So check the network selection in the deposit dialogue immediately before sending, not against a guide from the week before last. And as long as the tokens sit in the exchange account, the exchange holds the keys, not you: leave them there only as long as the move takes.
Your Galxe claim fails while G sits on the old chain
The deadline is not the only reason to act now. The contracts for Galxe Quests, meaning Loyalty Points and Token Rewards, have already moved from Gravity Alpha to Gravity L1. Anyone collecting points or rewards with a direct web3 wallet needs G on Gravity L1. The system looks there and nowhere else.
If your G is still on the Alpha chain, the claim fails. The help pages give the exact error message users then see: too few G tokens, even though the balance is visibly there. The fix is the same as above. Check in the wallet which chain your G tokens are actually on, bridge them to Gravity L1, switch the network in the wallet and try the claim again.
Galxe also names a more convenient variant called Smart Balance, which lets network fees across several networks be paid out of one balance. For the plain task of rescuing holdings before 1 November you do not need it; for regular participation in quests it takes work off your hands. If you pick up tokens through tasks like these, our airdrop overview lists the current opportunities.
December 2026 and the contradiction in the sources
For context, one point that stands out in the research and that you could stumble over if you read up yourself. The announcement and the exchange notices give 1 November 2026 as the day network operation ends. Gravity’s developer documentation gives the same withdrawal date but writes alongside it that the network will be “unsettled” in December 2026, meaning no longer settled.
Do not read that as an extension. Both sources require withdrawal by 1 November, and the December reference concerns the technical wind-down of the chain, not your window. Anyone relying on December is relying on a reading that neither source offers. What binds you is 1 November, and on the standard route 25 October.
Developers and operators on chain ID 1625
For developers more than a balance hangs on the date. Galxe requires that dApps, bots and scripts running on Gravity Alpha be redeployed to Gravity L1. That includes things that run invisibly day to day: a trading bot with a hard-coded chain ID, a monitoring script, a data collector that queries the old endpoint.
Two notes from the documentation help with the move. The chain ID changes from 1625 to 127001, and the contract addresses for G and the other tokens differ between the two networks. Anyone with addresses fixed in code has to swap them, not merely redirect the endpoint. The reference pages for the old chain will remain as an archive, according to Gravity, but the endpoints themselves will not.
Staying clean on tax: what counts in Germany
A chain switch is no trivial event for tax, and the position here is less clear-cut than it should be. Private disposals of crypto assets in Germany fall under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act: after a holding period of more than a year a gain is tax free, while within the year an exemption threshold of EUR 1,000 applies to all private disposals in a year taken together. Exceed that threshold and the entire gain is taxable, not only the part above it.
What is open is how the individual routes should be classified. When the canonical bridge moves the same token across chains, there is economically no exchange but a transfer. A route over liquidity pools, by contrast, gives you units out of a pool at the destination and can thereby take on the character of a swap, and a swap is a disposal under Section 23. The tax authorities have not commented explicitly on bridging, and a binding classification is not something this text can give you.
What you can do yourself is useful regardless: record the time, the amount and the addresses involved for every step while the old chain still answers queries. After the shutdown you will reconstruct that evidence less easily, because the public endpoints disappear. For larger amounts, or for a pool route, asking a tax adviser is worth the money.
Gravity Alpha: after 1 November your balance stays where it is
The situation is manageable as long as you deal with it now. Three steps, in this order:
- Review your holdings, today. Connect your wallet to Gravity Alpha and look at what is there and in what form. G, DAI and WBTC go over the official Gravity bridge; USDC, USDT and WETH only over Stargate. If G is in staking, unstake it first. Which form of custody is the right one afterwards is shown by the comparison of hardware wallets, where the keys stay with you.
- Pick a route and start by 25 October. Fast Withdraw for G takes about ten minutes, the canonical bridge roughly seven days, Stargate works in minutes. Anyone taking the standard route starts by 25 October. If it is to run through an exchange account instead, check beforehand whether deposits from Gravity Alpha are still open there; our exchange comparison shows which houses operate under European supervision.
- Collect the records before the chain closes. Note the date, amount and addresses of every transfer and file the confirmations. After 1 November that trail is hard to reconstruct. The tools for it are in our overview of tax software and portfolio trackers.
The sources for this article are Galxe’s bridging guide and the withdrawal page of the Gravity documentation, which sets out the routes per token and the waiting period in detail.
(As of October 12, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
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