BitMEX · 2358

Arthur Hayes Reminder: FLOP has not been released yet, and there are no presales or meme coins

BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes wrote a reminder that Flop Labs has not yet issued FLOP tokens, and there are no pre-sales or meme coins. Hayes stated that FLOP is not officially launched yet, and reminded the community not to mistake related tokens appearing on the market for official assets. He said Flop Labs is expected to launch an airdrop in the next few months and plans to launch the mainnet next year. According to previous public information, the project had previously planned a large-scale airdrop in the fourth quarter of 2026, and the target time for the main network Genesis block is the first quarter of 2027. Hayes previously announced that he will be leading Flop Labs, a project aimed at building economic infrastructure for AI agents, and FLOP will be designed as a native asset for AI agents to pay for resources such as computing power and storage.

5h ago

Arthur Hayes clarifies Flop Labs hasn't issued any tokens

BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes wrote an article clarifying that Flop Labs has not issued any tokens, no pre-sales, and no memecoins. There are currently no $FLOP tokens. Hayes said he will personally announce the airdrop in a few months when it starts, and will separately notify relevant developments when the main network goes live next year.

6h ago

Arthur Hayes: ETH is the largest position outside of Bitcoin, breaking through $3,000 or rushing towards $5,000

Comparing news, Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and head of the Maelstrom Fund, said that ETH is the largest position in its portfolio other than Bitcoin. He pointed out that ETH is a large token with the second-highest market capitalization yet to break through the 2021 all-time high. From a risk-return perspective, its zeroing risk is far lower than other crypto assets, so he is willing to invest heavily. Hayes believes that due to the limited increase in ETH in this cycle, there is plenty of room to make up for growth. Once the price starts, a reflexive upward trend will form. He said that after breaking through the $3000 mark, ETH could quickly rise above $5,000, and its target price for the end of the year is within reach. Currently, there are still a large number of investors who want to go long on ETH for various reasons.

1d ago
588 days, 300+ Web3 projects fall: who's still at the table?

588 days, 300+ Web3 projects fall: who's still at the table?

Source: Foresight News Author: Eric Original title: In 588 days, 300+ Web3 projects sank into the deep sea and sailed a thousand sails by the side of a sinking ship, and the disease tree is ahead of time. On the way to prosperity, any industry must go through a round of “dead bodies are everywhere” of elimination, and Web3 is no exception. According to Foresight News's review of public information, since 2025, at least 78 Web3 projects with a total funding amount of more than 1.5 million US dollars have been announced to be shut down. Of these, 69 projects that can confirm the amount of financing have taken away more than 900 million US dollars in total. If you count the small projects that didn't get financing from institutions and died silently, the total number is far over 300. This means that over the past nearly 600 days, an average Web3 project died every two days, or was famous or unknown. Of the 75 projects counted by Foresight News, 37 were shut down throughout 2025, while 41 were shut down in just half of 2026, and 17 were shut down in a single quarter in the second quarter, setting the highest number in a single quarter since this round of clearance. The “hot” DappRadar, Zapper, and established exchanges including BitMEX and AscendEX (formerly BitMax) in the last round of the bull market have all put an end to their business careers in nearly two years. The reshuffle did not stop as the market picked up; on the contrary, it accelerated. After receiving millions of dollars or even tens of millions of dollars in financing, every team that has stepped into this new world has had the proud ambition of “laughing at the sky and going out. Are our generation people from Fenghao?” But after a few years of being baptized in the market, these cold and cruel numbers are still in front of everyone's eyes. Emerging markets are also markets, and Web3 isn't more gentle than other industries. “Not being able to support myself” is the number one “cause of death”. Looking at the “cause of death” of 75 projects, the first one ranked was “insufficient funding,” with 31 projects falling on this issue, accounting for more than 40%; followed by “insufficient market demand,” and 17 companies shut down as a result. The two added up are close to two-thirds of the total. In other words, the vast majority of projects die for only one reason: they have never been able to support themselves. The expressions used by these projects in the shutdown announcement are similar. Many of them say “after trying our best to find a path to sustainable development, we have not found a path to sustainable development.” The subtext of this sentence is: At the beginning of the project, there was actually no idea how to do it, or the initial idea was very different from the actual situation in the market. Some industry observers rated this wave of bankruptcy as “a direct reflection of the failure of the business model and the breakdown of the capital chain, rather than simply fluctuating market sentiment,” which can be described as hitting the head. The investment logic of the primary market has completely changed in the past two years. The first question investors meet is no longer “how much room do you have for imagination”, but “how to make money.” The first batch of projects whose revenue did not cover operating costs or tell a new story fell after the financing floodgates were tightened. The OSL Institute summarized this shift in its annual report as the industry moving from the “first half” to the “second half”: a growth model driven by rising asset prices and innovative agreements came to an end, and the market moved “from narrative to delivery.” To put it more bluntly, the market and capital are no longer willing to pay for “experiments,” and the project's self-hematopoietic ability has become a necessity. Compared to the reason they wanted to be clear, the five projects that announced that the “model is unsustainable” seemed much more honest. For example, Goldfinch, which made unsecured credit loans, lost blood and shut down due to continued bad loans to emerging market companies; the social game Fantasy.Top, which is a popular social game that relies on tokens to motivate, makes it difficult to sustain the incentive model after the popularity recedes. The “unsustainable model” is a very interesting reason for the collapse. Most unsecured credit loans in traditional financial markets are based on big data or personal past credit records to set reasonable limits. As an emerging “lending company,” Goldfinch dares to provide unsecured credit loans in emerging markets without credit data. This is not a problem that can be solved by cryptocurrency and Web3 alone. Obviously, the reason for the birth of this company with a total financing amount of nearly 40 million is hard to convince. I don't know how top institutions like a16z were fooled into entering the market. Additionally, some companies have died due to regulation. Mango Markets shut down through a community vote after reaching a settlement with the SEC...

10d ago22#WEB3
Some people use it, have brands, and don't issue coins. Why has POAP reached the end?

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 cope with 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 accustomed to discussing how a project was born; next, we may need to get 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” swept through the Web3 encryption industry. In the last round of expansion, it is 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 with TVL, number of addresses, and number of transactions, but it rarely asked that last question:...

12d agoburnking

Over 100 crypto projects have been shut down in 2026, and the industry is experiencing an internet bubble reshuffle

According to Twitter, more than 100 crypto projects have closed, filed for bankruptcy, or permanently ceased operations since 2026, and the pace of withdrawal is accelerating. In late July alone, BitMEX, BitMart, Movement Labs, and Storj Labs announced closures or submitted related applications. The exit project covered trading platforms, wallets, DeFi lending agreements, the NFT marketplace, and the L1 blockchain; Polka's parallel chain Moonbeam also permanently ceased operation on July 31, and user funds that were not bridged in time were stranded. This round of clean-up has been described as similar to the restructuring of the industry after the bursting of the internet bubble. The number of Ethereum's general-purpose L2 grew rapidly in 2023, but as the threshold for the deployment chain was lowered, the market became congested and projects lacked differentiation. Espresso Systems CEO Ben Fisch said that the current integration phase is a general-purpose L2, not all L2s. Lorenzo Valente, research director at ARK Invest, said that the crypto industry is undergoing the largest consolidation in history, capital is becoming more picky, and teams and trading platforms that lack a fit for the actual product market are being shut down; Hyperliquid and Pump.fun already account for 67% of the total revenue of the application layer. The problem with a large number of projects is that they have usage but no revenue in the traditional sense of the word. Many teams use their own tokens to pay engineers, subsidize liquidity, and cover security audits. Recently, most altcoins in the bear market have fallen by 70% to 90%, making token-denominated capital reserves and operating cycle estimates invalid. DAO governance tool platform Tally, which served more than 500 agreements, processed over $1 billion in payments, and helped protect up to $80 billion in on-chain value, was shut down due to the lack of a sustainable business model for governance tools. The security incident further hastened the exit of the project. Blockaid estimates that on-chain attacks lost $1.1 billion in the first half of 2026, more than the full year of 2025; Kelp DAO and Drift Protocol incidents lost $293 million and $285 million, respectively. TRM Labs estimates that North Korea-related attackers accounted for 66% of total crypto attack losses over the same period. Projects that can continue to grow in a bear market generally rely on dollar revenue rather than their own tokens. Hyperliquid's cumulative processing fees exceeded 1 billion US dollars on June 30, and currently accounts for 70% of the decentralized perpetual contract market; as of July, Aave held more than 12 billion US dollars in deposits, and annual loan fees exceeded 100 million US dollars. What these projects have in common is not the most complex technology, the most financing, or the largest community, but rather the establishment of products that users are willing to pay for. This article is sponsored by GENG, Build Your Fortune on GENG (https://geng.one)

13d agoburnking

News: BitMEX's quest to sell failed, or the founder's holding structure and business contraction discouraged buyers

In comparison, according to CoinDesk, quoting people familiar with the matter, cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX spent two years discussing sales with several potential buyers, including rival exchanges and payment platform Exodus, before announcing the shutdown of operations, but ultimately failed to reach a deal. According to people familiar with the matter, potential acquirers were mainly deterred by the company's founder's holding structure, continued shrinking business, and legacy reputation issues. According to reports, the company hired investment bank Broadhaven to operate the sale process in early 2025. People familiar with the matter said that although co-founders Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo, and Samuel Reed had already withdrawn from the business after being criminally charged by the US in 2020, the three still controlled the vast majority of the company's shares, making negotiations more difficult, as buyers usually wanted to use part of the purchase consideration in exchange for management to stay in office after the transaction was completed. Furthermore, during the sale process, BitMEX continued to lose market share due to trading activity flowing to larger centralized exchanges and decentralized perpetual contract platforms, making potential acquirers unwilling to pay the revenue multiples usually given to growing companies.

14d ago

The wave of crypto shutdowns has entered a deep bear stage: over 60 well-known projects have left the market, and the cleaning of the bear market has accelerated

Comparing the news, as time entered the second half of the bear market, the cryptocurrency market experienced a clear round of industry clearance. Today, Shaw Walters, founder of ElizaOS (formerly ai16z), announced that the AI16z/ElizaOS token has completely died, and the associated foundation will gradually cease operations. This is another iconic exit event following the shutdown of over 60 well-known crypto projects in the first half of the year. According to statistics, in 2026, more than 60 well-known crypto projects, public chain/Layer2, DeFi protocols, wallets, NFT platforms, and DAO tools have announced that they have stopped operations or filed for bankruptcy, and the pace of shutdown accelerated markedly in late July. This round of exit covered almost every track. On the PT1 side of centralized trading, derivatives pioneer BitMEX announced on July 23 that it will officially close on September 23, ending 11 years of operation; AscendEX stopped trading on July 1 due to failure to obtain an EU MiCA license; and BitMart initiated a phased shutdown. In Layer1/Layer 2 and infrastructure, Polygon zkEVM, Botanix, Sophon, Powerloom, MilkyWay, etc. have been suspended one after another. In the DeFi sector, Radiant Capital, Step Finance (after being hacked for around $40 million), Ionic Protocol, Everclear, etc. withdrew due to security incidents or liquidity exhaustion. Wallet tracks include Secondfi, Ctrl Wallet, and Leap Wallet closed due to security breaches or strategic adjustments. NFTs, games, and tool projects such as Foundation, Fishing Frenzy, Tally, and Zapper have not been spared. The main reasons focus on three points: the business model fails to generate sustainable revenue (even if some projects have had high monthly activity or transaction volume), the outflow of users and funds due to the cooling of the racetrack, and hacker attacks directly cut off the funding chain. Many projects have received millions to tens of millions of dollars in financing, but it is difficult to prove the product's market fit after the market retracted. Unlike a series of explosions in leverage in 2022, this round was more about starving to death — orderly or forced exits after running out of funds. This article is sponsored by GENG, Build Your Fortune on GENG (https://geng.one)

17d agoburnking