By Nirup Ramalingam, CEO and Co-Founder of BridgePort

Since September 2025, over 100 crypto projects have closed their doors, including big names like BitMex, Balancer, Everclear, and ZeroLend. Exchanges, DeFi protocols, wallets, NFT marketplaces, and blockchains have all experienced their fair share of bankruptcy filings and shut downs. In 118 TGE launches in 2025, 100 landed below their valuation, the median token was down 71% from its launch value. Over 53% of all tokens launched since 2021 are now inactive, with 7.7 million failing in the fourth quarter of 2025. 

In a space that not long ago was skyrocketing in hype and value, this is an uncomfortably necessary development. For years, the crypto industry has operated under the assumption that growth itself was validation of existence. Projects that could attract capital, launch tokens, and accumulate transaction volume were automatic successes. This leads, naturally, to an explosion of products all solving the same problem. There can only be so many OTC platforms. Only so many DeFi banking projects. Now, as retail capital continues to exit and the bear market drags along, crypto is asking how projects differentiate themselves. For most, that’s a much tougher question to answer. In an era defined by the dawn of institutional participation, every product must either improve the cost of trading, give access to liquidity, allow firms to deploy capital more efficiently, reduce operational complexity, or provide some other form of institutional utility. A lot of these dying protocols provide none of the above. 

Crypto has spent too long building for quantity rather than quality, and these shutdowns demonstrate that activity isn’t enough by itself. Some closed exchanges had significant transaction volumes, and some shut down protocols raised significant capital, but usage does not equal utility. Take Everclear, for example, who reached $500 million in monthly volume before shutting down after failing to develop sustainable revenue, and Tally, who helped power governance across more than 500 protocols, facilitating $1 billion in payments, but couldn’t build a financially viable business. Meanwhile, Hyperliquid has surged in growth and popularity by offering a product that users are willing to use. Useful projects present a problem and capitalize on a way to solve it. Those that can do so are the ones that will survive in this ecosystem. 

I believe the industry’s current consolidation phase will ultimately be healthy. Financial markets don’t reward complexity for complexity’s sake. Infrastructure survives because it removes friction from the system; particularly in crypto, where fragmentation is one of the industry’s defined challenges. Liquidity is spread across dozens of venues, capital sits idle because counterparties lack the relationships or technology to move efficiently, and firms are forced to prefund accounts across multiple exchanges. Adding another trading venue exemplifies those problems even more. 

Our industry’s early years rewarded experimentation, but it also created a system with products that had no reason to exist. Sometimes, in order to know what works, you have to know what doesn’t, and the criteria for survival has changed as institutional interest continues to pique. I’d go as far as to argue that our industry has needed this for a long time

That’s not to say that I enjoy watching companies fail, and it’s a harsh standard as projects continue to collapse, but creative destruction isn’t exclusive to our ecosystem. For those of you who were around, think about the internet boom of the early 2000s.  Only a few of thousands of companies endured. The same process is likely to play out across emerging technologies today. 

The survivors will be those that demonstrate tangible value. For most firms, that means moving beyond the premise of innovation and towards utility in measurable terms: execution, liquidity, capital efficiency, and lower friction. The theory of evolution is often distilled down to one idea: survival of the fittest. Species adapt to changing conditions, compete for resources, and evolve according to what allows them to survive. Crypto is going through a similar process.

The speculative excesses from the past few years are beginning to phase out. Institutions need solutions that perform reliably, efficiency, and at scale, and the survivors will provide infrastructure those institutions cannot afford to lose. Our graveyard may be growing, but it also may be what allows the industry’s most useful protocols to finally emerge, and what gives us the credibility we’ve lacked for years.

Nirup Ramalingam is the CEO and Co-Founder of BridgePort, a middleware platform for off-exchange settlement in institutional crypto trading. He previously held senior roles at CME Group, overseeing global FX adoption at EBS, managing one of the largest OTC derivatives SEFs, and building crypto trading infrastructure. Earlier in his career, he held positions at NEX, ICAP, and RBS. Nirup holds a Bachelor of Commerce in Accounting and Finance from Macquarie University and a Chartered Accountancy qualification from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Australia.