100 Crypto Projects Die in 2026: This Time No Blowups, Only Starvation

By: Xiao Bing

On July 17, BitMart released a high-spirited half-year report: assets under management grew by about 256%, new prediction market products launched, and just in June obtained an Australian financial services license. The report also admitted the backdrop wasn't pretty: Bitcoin fell 30% in half a year, Ethereum halved, and spot ETFs saw record net outflows.

Nine days later, on July 26 at 01:30 UTC, the same company announced an orderly shutdown. New user registration stopped, deposits closed, contract accounts switched to reduce-only mode, trading fully stopped on August 26, and complete closure on January 31, 2027. The platform token BMX fell nearly 60% that day.

Even more absurd was the statement by former Global CEO Nenter Chow on X: He was notified of his termination on July 24, did not participate in any management or decisions thereafter, and like everyone else, he learned about the shutdown from the announcement.

Three days prior, BitMEX had just announced the exchange would close on September 23 at 04:00 UTC, ending 11 years.

Going further back, AscendEX had already shut down on July 1, and EXMO entered liquidation due to being listed on the UK's sanctions list against Russia.

Within one month, four named centralized exchanges exited.

RootData's 2026 crypto industry death project list has counted to the 100th and is still updating.

The Numbers Aren't Large

The number 100 looks scary in a headline, but not so scary in a historical coordinate system.

According to RootData's own statistics, 67 in 2021, 250 in 2022, 230 in 2023, 171 in 2024. Seven months into 2026, less than 100, and the full year likely won't catch up to 2022 and 2023.

So 2026 cannot yet be called the crypto industry's coldest summer; the truly cold part lies in the quality of the death list.

Looking through the names on the list: wallets include Family, Ctrl, Leap; exchanges include BitMart, BitMEX, AscendEX; infrastructure and DeFi include Zapper, Stream Finance, Parsec, Loopring, Goldfinch.

BitMEX lived for 11 years, BitMart for 9 years, Loopring was one of the earliest zkRollups on Ethereum. These are not air projects that issued tokens in 2024 and ran away in 2025; they are veterans with brands, users, real revenue, who survived the previous bear market.

What died in 2022 was leverage and Ponzi schemes; the longer the death list, the cleaner the industry. What is dying in 2026 is business models; the shorter the list, the more it indicates the knife has cut into the flesh.

From Explosion to Starvation

The way of dying has also changed.

The common characteristic of that batch of deaths in 2022 was violence: Luna went to zero in three days, 3AC defaulted on margin calls, FTX misappropriated customer assets and faced a bank run, Celsius froze withdrawals. Death happened instantly, user assets evaporated directly, and judicial proceedings are still dragging on today.

The common characteristic of this batch in 2026 is decency.

BitMEX gave users a full two-month liquidation period, with withdrawal windows open until 2027; BitMart gave one month for liquidation and six months for withdrawals, repeatedly reminding users to complete identity verification before applying; Storj went for Chapter 11 reorganization instead of liquidation, the network operates as usual, and customer service is not interrupted.

The wording of the announcements is almost identical: After prudent assessment of operating conditions, market environment, and future strategic direction, decided to exit in an orderly manner.

Translated into plain language, the business is no longer profitable. No hackers, no bank runs, no law enforcement raids, just the numbers don't add up.

Starvation and explosion are two completely different market signals. Explosion means systemic risk is spreading; one fall brings down many; starvation means individual business failure, with risk isolated within its own balance sheet.

Mid-Tier Collapse

The distribution of the death list is not random; it precisely hit the industry's mid-tier.

Simon Dedic of Moonrock Capital stated the problem with medium-sized exchanges very plainly: The fatal flaw of this model is reliance on a continuous inflow of new users; once new users stop, the business cannot hold up.

For a medium-sized exchange to survive, it needs compliance licenses, entities in multiple locations, market maker rebates, 7×24 customer service, and risk control and audit teams. This set of fixed costs could be tens of millions of dollars a year, only diluted by fees when trading volume is large enough. BitMart's 24-hour trading volume before shutdown was about $1.6 billion, which sounds significant, but is less than a fraction compared to Binance. The entire market's daily trading volume shrunk from its peak to the $37 billion level; head platforms continue to make money via scale and derivatives, native on-chain small tools can barely survive because they have almost no fixed costs, only this mid-tier layer, where revenue declines linearly with the market, but costs are rigid.

The primary market simultaneously confirmed this. In 2025, there were 933 financing events throughout the year, a year-on-year decrease of 40.3%, hitting a five-year low, but total financing amount increased 120.6% year-on-year, with all money flooding into a few ultra-large targets like Polymarket and Binance. 2026 Q1 financing was $4.59 billion, a quarter-on-quarter decline of 46.7%, the average value of $36 million was 4.4 times the median of $8 million. The result of capital voting with real money is convergence towards the head and contraction on the tail, while the mid-tier neither gets big money nor has secondary market valuation support anymore.

The death list is just the manifestation of this capital structure over time.

Token Experiment in Bankruptcy Court

Storj deserves to be singled out.

On July 26, Storj Labs filed a Chapter 11 application with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of West Virginia, case number 5:26-bk-00512. The company emphasized this is active reorganization rather than cessation of operations, the storage network works as usual, parent company Inveniam continues support, with the goal of clearing historical debt left from previous acquisitions, divesting non-core business, and refocusing on decentralized storage.

What is truly interesting is the idea thrown out in its open letter to the community: Explore a court-approved mechanism to allow STORJ token holders to participate in the equity of the reorganized company.

This is unprecedented. Tokens have always been an awkward existence legally, neither equity nor debt, usually nothing in bankruptcy proceedings. If Storj really can let utility token holders exchange for equity under court supervision, the legal status of crypto assets will be pushed forward a big step. The company itself said the distribution mechanism and participation terms are not yet set, everything waits for the reorganization plan to be approved by the court.

An 8-year-old project, at its most desperate moment, may leave the industry a precedent more important than its storage network. This kind of thing only happens in a true bear market, because only companies with no way out will try paths no one has tried before.

Is This a Sign of the Bottom?

Conclusion first: the death list is a lagging indicator; it proves clearance is happening, but cannot prove clearance has ended.

Reviewing 2022, Bitcoin bottomed after the FTX collapse in November, while the 250 death projects recorded by RootData were mostly concentrated in the six to twelve months after the collapse. Project shutdowns require completing the full process of layoffs, liquidation, withdrawals, and legal affairs, naturally lagging behind price. Using death count to time the bottom is basically equivalent to using last year's newspaper to predict tomorrow's weather.

What really needs watching is another three sets of data.

The first set is ETF capital flows. Q2 U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF net outflows were about $5 billion, the largest quarterly outflow since the product launched in January 2024. CoinShares' James Butterfill calculated that over the eight weeks starting from early May, cumulative outflows were about $8 billion, equivalent to 8% of ETF assets under management, comparable in magnitude to the 2018 cycle bottom. The turning point appeared from July 14 to 23, where spot ETFs saw net inflows for seven consecutive trading days, totaling $981.2 million. One instance of seven consecutive positive inflows is not enough to confirm a trend reversal, but it at least shows selling pressure is no longer one-sided.

The second set is primary market financing median. Total amount can be pulled up by one or two ultra-large financings, the median cannot lie. 2026 Q1's $8 million is the current market's real water level; if this number does not probe lower for two consecutive quarters, it means the financing environment for early-stage projects has bottomed.

The third set is the completion degree of mid-tier clearance. Medium-sized exchanges, second-tier L2s, DeFi protocols relying on token incentives, the shutdown pace of these three types of entities is still accelerating, four exchanges left in July alone.

Before this batch is finished, it is too early to talk about the industry bottom.

So, the 2026 death list is hard to call a bottom-fishing signal, more like a clearance receipt. It tells the market that business models sustained by token incentives and new user inflows have been systematically falsified; surviving companies must have real revenue.