The wave of Web3 project closures spreads! The statistical logic and thoughts behind the RootData death project list

Author: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher

Recently, the pessimistic sentiment in the crypto market has continued to spread, and the "2026 Compilation of Dead Projects in the Crypto Industry" released by RootData has sparked concentrated discussions in the industry about the wave of project closures, becoming a core reflection of current market sentiment and intuitively confirming that the crypto industry is entering a new round of deep reshuffling.

After the release of this compilation, it quickly gained widespread dissemination and interpretation from industry media and leading KOLs both domestically and internationally. Mainstream crypto media such as Coindesk, Cointelegraph, CryptoSlate, ChainCatcher, Wu Says Blockchain, PAnews, Techflow, as well as dozens of leading crypto KOLs including Blockchain Mr., BITWU, Ai Yi, alvin617, Crypto Little Sister, Solitary Crane, Cheshire, Benjieming, and Coin World King, have all shared their views and engaged in in-depth discussions on the X platform and their own channels, making "crypto dead projects" one of the core topics in the industry across the internet.

In the face of such high market attention, RootData believes it is necessary to publicly disclose the statistical methodology behind this "death list" and share our thoughts on the current clearing wave in the crypto industry based on data.

I. Criteria for Determining Dead Projects

In data statistics, clear standards and rigorous logic are prerequisites for ensuring the reference value of the data.

Unlike the subjective methods of determining project death based solely on "rumors" and "public sentiment," RootData has established a standardized determination system based on automated tracking and manual verification, focusing on official announcements and objective operational behaviors of projects. Three major death determination criteria have been defined, and all listed projects have undergone dual verification to minimize misjudgments. The specific determination rules are as follows:

• The project party announces the cessation of operations or complete bankruptcy on its official website or social media.

• The project party has not updated its official website or social media (such as X, Discord) for more than six months.

• The official website and social media accounts of the project party cannot be accessed or have been canceled.

Among these, projects classified as dead from the first method account for no more than 20% of the statistics; those from the third method account for no more than 10%, and since there is no exact death date, we will only change their status to "ceasing operations" without including them in a specific year's death project compilation; projects from the second method account for more than 70%, which is also the mainstream form of project exit in the industry.

For long-term silent projects, RootData has established a regular monitoring mechanism: the system automatically tracks the update times of project X accounts across the internet. For suspicious projects that have not updated for over six months, an automatic manual verification process is triggered to check the operational status across all dimensions, including official website dynamics, blog announcements, GitHub code submissions, and community operations, excluding special cases such as "temporary pauses in updates" or "silent version iterations," ensuring accurate determinations.

This tracking method is also the main reason why the number of projects in the 2026 death project compilation is significantly lower than the death project numbers in 2025 and 2024: many projects that stopped updating social media from February to June of this year have not yet exceeded six months of inactivity, and thus have not been included in the death project scope.

As of now, the number of dead projects in 2026 is 124, while the number of dead projects in 2024 and 2025 has exceeded 400. However, it can be expected that as time progresses, a large wave of projects will be included in the death project category by the end of the year, potentially creating a record for the number of dead projects in history.

Moreover, some situations that are typically considered as project deaths do not actually meet the determination criteria. For example, in late July of this year, the original core development company of the Movement blockchain, Movement Labs (MVMT), announced its application for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in a Delaware court, which was interpreted by the outside world as the death of Movement. However, the company applying for bankruptcy now has no substantial connection to the Movement blockchain, as the development of Movement has been handled by Move Industries for six months.

The decentralized storage protocol Storj also applied for Chapter 11 reorganization in a federal bankruptcy court in Northern West Virginia in July this year, but this does not mean the project has ceased operations; its main goal is to resolve early legacy debts, and the company itself continues to operate.

The original Polkadot parachain Moonbeam blockchain announced its official shutdown in July this year, but the Moonbeam project itself has not ceased operations; instead, it has transformed into a decentralized AI Agent communication and settlement network. The GLMR token will be migrated to Base at a 1:1 ratio, becoming a native ERC-20 token. Therefore, Moonbeam also does not meet the criteria for being marked as ceasing operations.

In short, the core criteria for RootData's determination of dead projects are: the project ecosystem is completely stagnant, the team has ceased operations, and there are no ongoing iterative behaviors. Simple changes in entities, business transformations, or debt restructurings are not considered project deaths.

II. Observations and Thoughts Derived from Dead Projects

Among the more than 20,000 crypto projects currently recorded by RootData, about 12,000 have X accounts that are not canceled. If we use the behavior of posting tweets in August as a criterion for determining project activity, then the current number of active projects in the crypto market is approximately 2,200. If we extend the time period to June-August, the number of active projects is about 3,400.

However, some projects that have not updated their tweets in a timely manner may simply have reduced their tweeting frequency due to market conditions. Some crypto projects that do not update their tweets are still updating on other social media platforms such as GitHub, LinkedIn, and blogs, and some crypto projects do not have Twitter accounts. Therefore, this statistical indicator cannot accurately reflect the number of active projects in the crypto market, but it still constitutes a very referential indicator—at least it outlines the shrinking profile of "speaking entities" in the industry, and the willingness to speak is often positively correlated with team confidence and resource investment.

Further statistics on the number of projects that have stopped updating tweets each month show that this number is rapidly increasing month by month, remaining above 200 this year.

At the same time, the number of new projects recorded by RootData each month has been between 70 and 100. By comparing these two data sets, it can be seen that since mid-2025, the number of active crypto projects has entered a "net decline" state, with the scale of new projects entering the market far from covering the scale of old projects exiting.

Undoubtedly, with the mergers and expansions of more and more crypto giants and the entry of various internet and financial giants, the golden period for crypto entrepreneurship has passed. Instead of focusing on the number of dead projects, we should pay more attention to the quality and quantity of new projects.

The bulk clearance of dead projects is a passive purification of the industry cycle, while the continuous emergence of high-quality new projects and the iterative landing of new narratives are the core driving forces for the industry to break through the bear market and achieve a new round of growth.

Among the newly recorded projects by RootData, the proportion of infrastructure projects is significantly decreasing to less than 10%, which means that the new batch of crypto projects will increasingly focus on the application layer or distribution layer, rather than directly competing with existing infrastructure.

Data shows that the proportion of new projects related to prediction markets and their tools, RWA cards, tokenized stocks, perpetual contracts, AI agents, and memecoin projects has exceeded 65%.

With a significant decline in VC investment, more and more entrepreneurial projects need the founding team to support themselves in the early stages or rely on cash flow driven by the project's own business, which may force new projects to be more pragmatic in their business models—from "burning money for growth" to "validating unit economics before expansion," and from chasing narrative hotspots to deeply cultivating segmented demands.

Although short-term pain is inevitable, this "forced self-discipline" may filter out teams that truly possess business resilience, reserving healthier seeds for the next cycle.

The crypto industry has never lacked cyclical prosperity and demise. Death is a part of the life cycle and a catalyst for ecological iteration. RootData will continue to uphold the principles of objectivity, neutrality, and data-driven approaches, recording and witnessing every iteration and evolution of the Web3 industry.