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:...
