On July 2, 2026, iExec will shut down the RLC bridge between Ethereum and the Bellecour sidechain. This is more than a technical deprecation. It is the formal closing of a chapter in iExec's
On July 2, 2026, iExec will shut down the RLC bridge between Ethereum and the Bellecour sidechain. This is more than a technical deprecation. It is the formal closing of a chapter in iExec's history, and the opening of the one that follows.
Bellecour was built with ambition. It was iExec's purpose-built sidechain, fast, low cost, and designed to power decentralized compute at scale. For years, it was the backbone of iExec's marketplace, the chain on which thousands of tasks were computed, on which iApps were deployed, and on which iExec's vision of a decentralized cloud took its first real shape.
We are proud of what was built there. Bellecour represented a bet that if iExec built the right infrastructure, builders would come. And many did.
But the landscape of Web3 evolved. Liquidity, developer activity, and institutional attention consolidated on a smaller set of EVM networks. The cost of asking projects and institutions to come to Bellecour, rather than meeting them where they already operate, became a friction point that limited the protocol's reach. The ecosystem signaled where it wanted iExec to be. iExec listened.
That is what good infrastructure decisions require: acknowledging what is no longer the right path, learning from it, and adapting.
The Bellecour sunset is the first step in a broader renewal of iExec's technical stack, and that renewal is already underway.
iExec is now live on Arbitrum, one of Ethereum's most developer-active L2 ecosystems, bringing iExec's confidential computing capabilities to the environment where builders already operate. The Nox protocol, iExec's confidentiality layer for on-chain finance, is now live on Arbitrum and Ethereum testnets. Mainnet deployments across multiple EVM networks are next. iExec is positioning itself to be the confidential computing layer of the multichain ecosystem, not a destination network builders have to migrate to.
The iApp migration is already complete. iExec tooling has fully moved on. The bridge shutdown is the final symbolic closure of the Bellecour era.
No RLC will be lost in this transition.
If you hold RLC on Bellecour today: You have until June 30, 2026 to bridge your tokens back to Ethereum yourself, using the official bridge at bridge-bellecour.iex.ec.
If you still hold RLC on Bellecour after the bridge shuts down on July 2: No action is required. Any wallet holding at least 0.1 RLC on Bellecour at the time of shutdown will be automatically credited the equivalent amount on Ethereum. The process may take a few business days to complete after July 2.
The majority of funds have already been withdrawn. The automatic credit mechanism is a safety net to ensure no holder is left behind.
To everyone who built on Bellecour, deployed iApps, ran workers, and helped shape what decentralized computing could look like: thank you. Bellecour is where iExec grew up. What comes next is built on everything we learned there.
The best chapters of iExec's story are still being written.
