Some people use it, have brands, and don't issue coins. Why has POAP reached the end?
Author: imToken
Original title: When POAP also comes to an end: When the “wave of bankruptcies” in the crypto industry hits, how can ordinary users handle themselves?
Recently, the crypto industry seems to have entered an intensive farewell period.
From BitMEX, which has been in operation for 11 years, to Satori Finance, which has received investment from top institutions such as Polychain and Coinbase Venture, one familiar name after another has ceased operations and officially reached the end, covering various directions such as trading platforms, DeFi, wallets, NFTs, and infrastructure.
Among them, POAP's departure was unquestionably particularly impressive.
If you've gone through the previous crypto cycle, especially if you've participated in Devcon, ETHDenver, Hackathon, DAO community events, or various online and offline meetups, many people can probably pull out a few POAPs from their wallets. It may be from a conference, an online sharing, or just a community event where you can't remember the details.
Most of these POAPs aren't worth much, but because of this, they're probably closer to the original meaning of “collecting” than many NFTs that used to be expensive.
It is for this reason that POAP's farewell is particularly representative.
It didn't suddenly go back to zero due to hacker attacks, and didn't even issue a native token that needed to continuously maintain price expectations. It just had real users, clear scenarios, and a high enough brand awareness, but in the end, it still hasn't found a business model that can support the company for a long time.
This is exactly what is changing in the crypto industry today.
In the past, we were more used to discussing how a project was born; next, we may need to get more and more used to discussing how a project dies.
And this isn't necessarily a bad thing. However, as regular users, we need to know how to avoid being affected by the aftershocks of a bear market.
1. A new form of “shutdown wave” is sweeping Web3
In the last round of expansion in the crypto industry, it was actually not difficult for a project to prove that it was “founded.”
The completion of financing, the launch of the main network, the issuance/airdrop, and a round of liquidity incentives are enough to attract the first batch of users. TVL, number of addresses, and transaction volume can quickly grow. Even over a long period of time, whether a project actually has revenue is not the most urgent issue.
However, when the cycle is reversed, and token prices and liquidity cannot continue to perform financing functions, this model will reveal one of the easiest questions, which is, if no new money comes in, can this project support itself?
This round of projects came to an end in 2026, and this is where the real focus is also on.
Because many of those that have disappeared are not air projects that had no products at the beginning, but projects that have already been funded, launched, have real users, and even run well technically.
For example, on July 23, BitMEX announced that it would officially shut down the trading platform on September 23, 2026.
This trading platform, founded in 2014, was once one of the most representative companies in the entire crypto derivatives market. Perpetual contracts, 100x leverage, and a complete set of trading products that were later widely used by the entire industry are closely related to the early development of BitMEX.
It even specifically emphasized in its official shutdown announcement that “in more than 11 years of operation, BitMEX has never lost user funds due to hacking,” but this has not made it an infrastructure that can run permanently.
A similar story happened on the DeFi and infrastructure circuit.
As a Bitcoin L2 project that has been under construction for nearly four years, Botanix has maintained 100% normal operation and zero security incidents since its launch. It has processed about 25 million transactions, 200,000 wallet addresses, and tens of millions of dollars of assets have entered the network, and is connected to infrastructure and DeFi products such as Chainlink and Morpho.
Looking only at traditional Crypto KPIs, it's hard to even call it a “no-go” project — the chain has been created, the products can be used, the users have come, and the money has come in. But in the end, Botanix decided to shut down the network, and the review showed that the actual transaction demand was insufficient to generate sufficient fee revenue and could not cover the infrastructure costs required for the long-term operation of an independent network.
At the end of the day, Crypto used to be too used to measure an ecosystem by TVL, number of addresses, and number of transactions, but it rarely asked the last question: How much real revenue did these users actually generate?
As the industry enters a more mature stage, projects that lack actual use, have no revenue for a long time, and have continued to exist gradually withdraw. In fact, it is more like a structural clean-up rather than a sudden loss of value for the entire industry.
It can even be said that after confirming that it cannot continue, a project actively stops adding new business, announces a schedule, and leaves an asset migration window for users, which is often more responsible than losing development capabilities while pretending that it is still in operation.
2. Under “chronic death,” what should ordinary users pay attention to?
This also raises an issue that can easily be overlooked.
There is a security principle that has been around for many years in the crypto industry: “Not your keys, not your coins,” so many people naturally think that as long as the assets are in a wallet that holds their own private keys, the core security problem has been solved.
This statement is of course correct, but it only solved half of the problem, because owning a private key solves account control, but it does not automatically guarantee that the asset itself is always redeemable and withdrawable.
The reason is simple: behind the “assets” displayed in the wallet, there may be something completely different. For example, the wallet contains assets worth 10,000 dollars:
One is native ETH on Ethereum;
One is a certificate of deposit under a certain loan agreement;
One is LP Token;
One is a BTC mapping asset minted through a cross-chain bridge;
They are also displayed in the wallet, and they also require the user's own private key to be signed before they can be transferred, but once the underlying protocol or even the underlying network stops working, the results may be completely different.
The first situation: the project stops service, but the user can still withdraw from the contract
The shutdown of dYdX v3 is a relatively ideal example.
In 2024, dYdX decided to stop v3 and shift the development focus to the new dYdX Chain. Subsequently, dYdX requested users to close their positions and withdraw USDC in advance. After the product was discontinued, although the relevant contract was frozen, it still retained the withdrawal method for users who had not yet withdrawn to process funds.
This case shows a perfect example of a “walkaway test” (exit test) — the team can stop providing the product, but the user's right to withdraw funds is not entirely dependent on the team to continue operating.
This is also a realistic standard for measuring how “unmanaged” a DeFi protocol actually is. That is, if one day the development team stops maintaining the product, ordinary users can rely on on-chain contracts to withdraw their own money.
Type 2: The coin is actually in your wallet, but it's just a “proof” of another asset
The story of Ren Protocol just showed a different side.
Those who have played in the last round of DeFi should be familiar with it. Ren was once a very important BTC cross-chain infrastructure. Among them, after transferring BTC to Ethereum through Ren, users will get the encapsulated token renBTC, so they can use it as collateral to perform operations such as generating income and borrowing within Ethereum's DeFi protocol.
Theoretically, renBTC can be stored in one's own wallet. Users control private keys, and the blockchain actually records this amount of renBTC.
But the problem is that renBTC itself is not BTC on the Bitcoin network; it represents an exchange right for the BTC behind Ren's cross-chain system.
As a result, after Alameda Research went out of business in 2022, causing Ren to lose critical financial support, the Ren 1.0 network began shutting down, and projects including BadgerDAO urgently reminded users to withdraw their renBTC exposure because once Ren 1.0 stops running, renBTC holders will no longer be able to exchange assets back to Bitcoin's main network BTC through the original bridging system.
In other words, even though you still have renBTC in your wallet, and others can't destroy or transfer it, you can't use only your private key to get the Ren Network, which has already stopped working, to replace you with real BTC across the chain.
The same principle also applies to large numbers of cross-chain assets, encapsulated assets, LP tokens, loan certificates, and some pledged derivatives.
The user controls this “certificate”. As to whether the certificate can eventually redeem the underlying assets, it also depends on whether the smart contracts, reserve assets, oracles, cross-chain validators, liquidity, and redemption systems behind it still work properly.
Type 3: If even the underlying network has to be shut down, the private key won't let a chain continue to generate blocks
Further down the level, the problem becomes more immediate.
That is, some chains will directly shut down or almost be abandoned (it is difficult to guarantee stable block generation), such as Eclipse, AO, etc., which I have personally experienced. If the entire network stops running, users can still keep that string of private keys, and they can also keep records of how many tokens they have in historical blocks, but they may not be able to freely send assets as in the past.
So, if you break down “asset control” more completely, it actually includes at least three levels:
The first level is account control: who actually holds the private key and mnemonic words;
The second layer is the right to claim assets: whether the wallet holds native assets or certificates issued by an agreement, cross-chain bridge, custodian or asset pool;
The third layer is the right to withdraw from execution: when the user actually decides to leave, whether the underlying network, smart contracts, liquidity, and necessary infrastructure will still allow this asset to be redeemed and migrated;
“Not your keys, not your coins” mainly addresses the first level.
However, when a project begins to decline, stop maintenance, or even close, the ones that are really prone to problems are often the last two layers. This is why, in the face of an ongoing structural clean-up of the industry, what we need to pay more attention to is that if this project stops operating tomorrow, can I take away the assets in their entirety today?
3. Comprehensively and accurately understand the meaning of “self-hosting”
In fact, most projects don't suddenly jump from “completely normal” to “completely dead” one day.
A real recession usually lasts a long time.
A relatively practical way to judge is not to just focus on tokens, but to look at people, money, codes, and exit channels at the same time.
Let's look at the money first, especially after there are no liquidity incentives and subsidies, and whether there is any real demand. After all, TVL isn't the higher the safer, and the number of transactions isn't the more valuable it is. The main thing is how many people will continue to use it after the token reward is removed. Can the agreement revenue cover team survival and other costs?
Let's take a look at people, especially if the project is still being updated by social media. Because many projects won't officially announce that no one has developed them (many of the official announcement projects mentioned above are already considered ethical), the more common situation is that GitHub hasn't updated the core code for half a year, no one has responded to serious bugs for a long time, the roadmap has been extended over and over again, and the community is unmaintained
The last step is exiting the channel, which is the easiest step for the average user to overlook, yet probably the most valuable. For a relatively important on-chain asset, you should at least know which chain it is on, what the contract address is, whether the wallet shows the original asset or certificate, how to exchange it back to the most basic asset, and whether there are any other ways to interact after the official front-end is suspended;
Therefore, after the industry begins to experience more structural clarification, the concept of “self-hosting” also needs to be understood more fully. For long-term underlying assets, as much as possible, it is still one of the most important security bottoms.
But after getting involved in DeFi, cross-chain, staking, and other on-chain products, I need to ask one more question, where exactly did my assets go?
Depositing ETH into an agreement and receiving a token in the wallet doesn't mean that ETH is still lying in the original address; seeing a BTC L2 after crossing the BTC chain doesn't mean that you still have real BTC; seeing the balance after transferring assets to LP, Vault, or the loan market doesn't mean that you will definitely be able to get back the original price according to the numbers on the screen when you exit.
Write at the end
The reason why POAP left the market made many old users feel emotional is that it is once again a Web3 player. A product can have no tokens, no huge financial games, and even if it is really liked by many people, it may still end its operation one day.
This isn't an anomaly in the blockchain world.
On the contrary, it could mean that the crypto industry is finally beginning to look more and more like a normal industry. Products have lifecycles, teams change, failed business models exit, and limited developers, capital, and users continue to flow to more efficient places.
There is a chance that such a farewell will happen again in the next few years.
Some projects will leave on-chain memories of an era like POAP; some protocols will shut down in an orderly manner like dYdX v3 to allow users to continue to exit through contracts; there are also assets like renBTC, making people not re-aware of what they are holding in their wallets until the infrastructure is ready to shut down.
Agreements will disappear, projects will fail, and a chain may even reach its end.
However, the most important underlying logic of cryptographic asset security should not change. That is, don't tie your ultimate control to the fact that a project can run forever.
I will work with you.
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