Crypto shutdowns peaked in April; institutional rails expand

A tracker compiled by researchers recorded at least 109 crypto projects that shut down, were winding down or became inactive by Aug. 5, 2026. The count includes projects across multiple categories and captures activity through early August.

The tracker assigns 99 entries to projects marked shut down, six to projects labeled winding down and four to inactive products. DeFi accounted for 28 closures, the largest single sector in the dataset. Other categories included gaming with 15 entries, infrastructure with 13, layer-1 and layer-2 projects with 12, non-fungible tokens with 10, and a combined 18 entries for wallets, exchanges and analytics tools. The monthly timeline in the tracker peaked at 27 recorded closures in April, then fell to 21 in May, 20 in June, 14 in July and three through Aug. 5.

Further scanning by the same researchers identified 52 smaller projects, which raises the year-to-date potential total to 161 entries. The tracker does not include a comparable 2025 count or a denominator for projects launched during 2026, and the authors describe the total as a bounded snapshot rather than an industrywide failure rate.

Several widely used projects are among those listed. On Aug. 3, Isabel Gonzalez, co-founder of POAP, announced the project would wind down after more than five years, writing that funding cycles and distribution dynamics made it “difficult to build a sustainable company without eroding the ethos that gave POAP meaning.” The dashboard Zapper announced closure in early August. Centralized venues also appear in the tracker: on July 26, BitMart disclosed a wind-down plan that schedules trading to stop on Aug. 26 and platform operations to cease on Jan. 31, 2027. BitMEX announced its exchange closure three days earlier. Polygon’s zkEVM completed a planned sunset in July, a deprecation that had been announced in June 2025.

At the same time, several large financial firms and industry utilities reported active or expanding use of controlled blockchain systems. In April, Visa reported its stablecoin settlement pilot had expanded to nine blockchains and reached a $7 billion annualized run rate. JPMorgan stated that Kinexys, its institutional blockchain platform, had processed more than $3 trillion since inception and was averaging over $5 billion a day. The Clearing House published a plan for a system to clear and settle tokenized commercial-bank money that would link blockchain activity with existing RTP and CHIPS networks and support continuous settlement. Swift said its shared ledger was ready for initial use and that 17 banks were preparing tokenized cross-border payment trials.

The tracker’s authors note there is no direct evidence in their dataset that capital moved from the closed projects into bank-led systems. Industry participants have described a recurring challenge for crypto-native projects: sustaining revenue and distribution without abandoning an open-protocol ethos when speculative demand declines.