No thunderstorms, no hackers, why are more projects falling in 2026?
By Claude, Deep Wave TechFlow
Original title: 100 crypto projects die in 2026: there was no explosion this time, only starved to death
On July 17, BitMart released an enthusiastic report for the first half of the year: the scale of asset management increased by about 256%, newly launched predictive market products, and just obtained an Australian financial services license in June. The report also acknowledged that the background board was not very good. Bitcoin fell 30% in half a year, Ethereum fell short, and spot ETF had a record net outflow.
Nine days later, at 01:30 UTC on July 26, the same company announced an orderly shutdown. New user registration was stopped, deposits were closed, contract accounts were switched to a position reduction mode, trading was completely stopped on August 26, and completely closed on January 31, 2027. The BMX platform coin fell by nearly 60% on the same day.
Even more absurd is former Global CEO Nenter Chow's statement on X:He was notified of his dismissal on July 24. Since then, he has not participated in any management decisions. He has seen the news of the shutdown from the announcement like everyone else.
Three days ago, BitMEX just announced the closing of the exchange at 04:00 UTC on September 23, ending 11 years.
Moving forward, AscendEX was shut down on July 1, and EXMO was liquidated because it was included in the UK's sanctions list against Russia.
Within a month, four well-known centralized exchanges withdrew.
RootData's 2026 list of dead projects in the crypto industry has reached number 100 and is still being updated.
The numbers aren't that big
The number 100 is scary in the title; it's not that scary when you put it in a historical coordinate system.
According to RootData's own statistics, 67 in 2021, 250 in 2022, 230 in 2023, 171 in 2024. After seven months in 2026, there are fewer than 100, and the full year is unlikely to catch up with 2022 and 2023.
So 2026 can't be called the coldest summer in the crypto industry, in a really cold place, in the texture of a death list.
Go through the names on the list: Wallets include Family, Ctrl, Leap, BitMart, BitMEX, and AscendEX; infrastructure and DeFi include Zapper, Stream Finance, Parsec, Loopring, Goldfinch.
BitMEX has lived for 11 years, BitMart has been alive for 9 years, and Loopring is the first batch of zkRollups on Ethereum. These aren't air projects that were issued in 2024 and ran off the road in 2025; they have brands, users, real income, and veterans who survived the previous bear market.
Lever and Ponzi died in 2022, and the longer the death list, the cleaner the industry. What died in 2026 is the business model. The shorter the list, the more it means that the blade has been cut into meat.
From explosion to starvation
The death method has also changed.
The common features of the 2022 deaths were violence: Luna returned to zero for three days, 3AC security deposit recovery was in default, FTX misappropriated customer assets were squandered, and Celsius froze withdrawals. The death occurred instantaneously, and the user's assets were directly evaporated, and the judicial process has not been completed until today.
The common characteristic of the 2026 batch is decency.
BitMEX gave users a full two-month liquidation period, and the withdrawal window was opened until 2027; BitMart gave users one month to close their positions and withdraw for six months, repeatedly reminding users to complete authentication before applying; Storj followed Chapter 11 restructuring rather than liquidation; the network was running as usual, and customer service was not interrupted.
The announcement worded almost exactly the same:After careful evaluation of the business situation, market environment and future strategic direction, it was decided to exit in an orderly manner.
Translate adult sayings, this is a business that is not profitable anymore. There were no hackers, no hacking, no law enforcement raids, it was just that the accounts couldn't be calculated.
Starvation and explosion are two completely different market signals. An explosion means that systemic risk is spreading, and the collapse of a family will be destroyed; starving to death means that individual businesses fail, and the risk is isolated in one's balance sheet.
Lower back collapse
The distribution of the death list was not random; it accurately hit the industry.
Moonrock Capital's Simon Dedic put the problem of mid-sized exchanges very bluntly:The fatal flaw of this model is that it must rely on a steady stream of new users. Once new users are interrupted, the business cannot sustain itself.
To be alive, a medium-sized exchange requires compliance licenses, multiple entities, market maker rebates, 7×24 customer service, and risk control and audit teams. This set of fixed costs may be tens of millions of dollars a year, and can only be diluted by processing fees when the transaction volume is large enough. BitMart had a trading volume of around $1.6 billion in the 24 hours before it shut down, which didn't sound small; it was less than a fraction in front of Binance. The average daily trading volume of the entire market has shrunk from its peak to the level of 37 billion US dollars. The leading platforms continue to make money by relying on scale and derivatives. The native gadgets on the chain can survive because there are almost no fixed costs. The only one at the waist level is where revenue falls linearly with the market, yet the cost is rigid.
The primary market simultaneously confirmed this incident. There were 933 financing incidents in 2025, a year-on-year decrease of 40.3%, a five-year low, but the total amount of financing increased 120.6% year over year, and all the money went to a few large targets such as Polymarket and Binance. Q1 financing in 2026 was $4.59 billion, down 46.7% month-on-month, and the average value of $36 million was 4.4 times the median of $8 million. As a result of voting with real money, capital converged towards the head and contracted against the tail, while the lower back was neither able to receive large sums of money, nor was there any valuation support from the secondary market.
The death list is only a reflection of this capital structure over time.
Token experiments in bankruptcy court
Storj is worth mentioning alone.
On July 26, Storj Labs filed a Chapter 11 application with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of West Virginia, Case No. 5:26 -bk-00512. The company emphasized that this is an active restructuring rather than a cessation of operation. The storage network is working as usual. The parent company Inveniam continues to support it. The goal is to clear up historical debts left over from previous acquisitions, divest non-core businesses, and refocus on decentralized storage.
What's really interesting is the idea it threw out in an open letter to the community:Explore a court-approved mechanism for STORJ token holders to participate in the restructured company's equity.
This is unprecedented. Tokens have always been an embarrassing legal entity. They are neither shares nor claims, and are usually nothing in bankruptcy proceedings. If Storj actually allows utility token holders to exchange shares under the auspices of a court, the legal status of crypto assets will be taken a big step forward. The company itself said that the distribution mechanism and terms of participation are still undecided; everything will have to wait until the restructuring plan is submitted to the court for approval.
An 8-year old project, at its worst, may have left the industry with a case law that is more important than its storage network.This kind of thing only happens in a real bear market, because only companies that have gone nowhere will try a path that no one else has tried.
Is this a bottom feature?
Let me conclude first: the death list is a lagging indicator. It shows that the clean-up is taking place; it cannot prove that the clean-up is over.
In 2022, Bitcoin bottomed out after the collapse of FTX in November, and the 250 deaths recorded by RootData were mostly concentrated in the six to twelve months after the collapse. The shutdown of the project requires completing the entire process of layoffs, liquidation, withdrawals, and legal affairs, which naturally lags behind the price. Using the number of deaths to time the bottom is basically equivalent to using last year's newspapers to predict tomorrow's weather.
What we really need to keep an eye on is the other three sets of data.
The first group is ETF funding flows. Q2 The net outflow from the US spot Bitcoin ETF was approximately $5 billion, the largest quarterly outflow since the product was launched in January 2024. James Butterfill of CoinShares estimates a cumulative outflow of about $8 billion over the eight weeks beginning in early May, equivalent to 8% of ETF management scale, comparable to the bottom of the 2018 cycle. The turning point occurred from July 14 to 23, with net inflows from spot ETFs for seven consecutive trading days, totaling US$981.2 million. A seven-day positive inflow is not enough to confirm a trend reversal, but it at least indicates that the selling pressure is no longer one-sided.
The second group is the median level of primary market financing. The total amount can be boosted by one or two large sums of financing, and the median figure cannot fool anyone. $8 million in Q1 2026 is the true level of the current market. If this figure does not decline for two consecutive quarters, it means that the financing environment for early projects has bottomed out.
The third group is the degree of perfection in which the lower back comes out. Medium-sized exchanges, second-tier L2, and DeFi protocols that rely on token incentives, the pace of shutdown of these three types of entities is still accelerating, leaving four exchanges in July.
Until this batch is over, it's too early to talk about the bottom of the industry.
Therefore, the 2026 death list is hardly a sign of bottoming out; it's more like a receipt. It told the market that the business model, which is maintained by token incentives and the influx of new users, has been systematically falsified, and surviving companies must have real income.
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