It’s only the first half of 2026, yet 99 crypto projects have officially shut down, gone bankrupt, or quietly disappeared. From wallets, CEX exchanges, DeFi to NFTs, L2, dev tools… sites are down without so much as a farewell message.

Honestly, there’s nothing too surprising. The 2024–2025 uptrend was an easy run for VC money—everyone could sketch a project and pump tokens to “survive.” Now the money flow has been drained; anyone who can’t generate real cash flow runs out of funds and has no choice but to turn around, gasping for air while waiting to die.
Seeing this latest purge list really shows how brutal it is. In the DAO governance space, Uniswap and Arbitrum—after raising $15M—still had to beg for funds because there’s no revenue. NFT marketplaces—Nifty Gateway from the Winklevoss camp, POAP, then Yupp, Syndicate Labs with a fund of several tens of millions of dollars—have all gone underground. Familiar names like ZeroLend, Step Finance, and the Ctrl Wallet also decided to bow out one after another.
This script isn’t new—anyone who lived through the 2018–2019 ICO crash or the 2022 CeFi downturn knows. At the end of every cycle, there’s a harsh cleanup.
It looks grim, but I think it’s extremely necessary. Those “zombie” setups have to die off so capital can refocus on real value. Anyone tough enough to push through this wave will be the fuse for the next uptrend. For now, all we need to do is simply hold tight, and carefully check who actually builds and makes money—then gradually accumulate.