BitMart published a strong first-half report on July 17, then announced an orderly shutdown just nine days later. In the same one-month window, BitMEX, AscendEX and EXMO also moved toward closure or liquidation. RootData’s running list of dead crypto projects in 2026 has now reached 100.
In its July 17 report, BitMart said assets under management had grown about 256%, that it had launched a prediction market product, and that it had obtained an Australian financial services license in June. The company also acknowledged a weak backdrop: Bitcoin had fallen about 30% in the first half, Ether had been cut in half, and spot ETF products had seen record net outflows.
Then, at 01:30 UTC on July 26, the exchange said it would wind down in an orderly manner. New user registration stopped, deposits were closed, and derivatives accounts were switched to reduce-only mode. All trading is set to stop on Aug. 26, and the platform is scheduled to shut down completely on Jan. 31, 2027. Its exchange token, BMX, fell nearly 60% that day.
The shutdown drew extra attention because of a statement from former global CEO Nenter Chow on X. He said he had been informed of his dismissal on July 24, had not taken part in any management or decision-making afterward, and learned of the closure through the public announcement.
BitMEX had announced three days earlier that it would close its exchange at 04:00 UTC on Sept. 23, ending an 11-year run. AscendEX had already shut down on July 1. EXMO entered liquidation after being placed on the U.K. sanctions list related to Russia. Within a month, four named centralized exchanges moved out of the market.
The count is notable, but not a historical peak
RootData’s tally of 100 dead projects in 2026 looks severe in isolation. In historical context, the figure is not the highest.
Using RootData’s own methodology, the count was 67 in 2021, 250 in 2022, 230 in 2023 and 171 in 2024. With seven months of 2026 gone, the annual total is still unlikely to catch 2022 or 2023.
The report argues that the key change is not the headline number, but the makeup of the list. It includes wallets such as Family, Ctrl and Leap; exchanges including BitMart, BitMEX and AscendEX; and infrastructure and DeFi names such as Zapper, Stream Finance, Parsec, Loopring and Goldfinch.
These were not fresh token issuers from 2024 that vanished in 2025. BitMEX had operated for 11 years. BitMart had been around for 9 years. Loopring was among the earliest zkRollup projects on Ethereum. They had brands, users, real revenue and had already lived through the previous bear market.
That is why the report draws a line between 2022 and 2026. In 2022, many failures were tied to leverage and Ponzi-like structures. In 2026, the projects dying are more often those whose business models no longer work.
From blowups to orderly retreats
The way projects fail has changed as well. In 2022, collapses were violent and fast: Luna went to zero in three days, Three Arrows Capital defaulted on margin calls, FTX faced a run after misusing customer assets, and Celsius froze withdrawals. Losses were immediate, and legal cases are still working their way through the courts.
The 2026 cases look different. BitMEX gave users a two-month window to close positions, with withdrawals available into 2027. BitMart offered one month for position unwinding and six months for withdrawals, while repeatedly telling users to complete identity verification before applying. Storj chose Chapter 11 reorganization rather than liquidation, with the network still running and customer service intact.
The language in many of these notices is nearly identical: after a careful review of operating conditions, the market environment and future strategy, the company decided to exit in an orderly way. Put plainly, the business was no longer making money. There was no hack, no run and no enforcement raid in these cases. The math simply stopped working.
That distinction matters. Blowups suggest contagion and system-wide stress, where one failure can drag down others. Slow shutdowns point to isolated operating failures, with risk mostly contained on each company’s own balance sheet.
The pressure is hitting the middle of the market
The report says the distribution of failures is not random. It is landing squarely on the middle tier of the industry.
Moonrock Capital’s Simon Dedic described the problem for mid-sized exchanges in direct terms: the fatal weakness of the model is its dependence on a constant stream of new users. Once that flow breaks, the business struggles to hold up.
To stay alive, a mid-sized exchange needs regulatory licenses, multiple legal entities, market-maker rebates, 7×24 customer support, plus risk-control and audit teams. Those fixed costs can run into tens of millions of dollars a year, and only large enough trading volumes can spread that burden across fee income.
BitMart’s 24-hour trading volume before the shutdown was about $1.6 billion. That sounds sizable on its own, but it was less than a tenth of Binance’s scale, according to the report’s framing. At the same time, total daily market volume had shrunk from its peak to around $37 billion. Large platforms can still earn from scale and derivatives. Small native on-chain tools can survive because their fixed costs are minimal. The middle gets squeezed: revenue falls with the market, while costs remain rigid.
Primary market data points in the same direction. There were 933 funding events in 2025, down 40.3% year over year and the lowest in five years, yet total capital raised rose 120.6% from a year earlier. Money concentrated in a small number of very large targets such as Polymarket and Binance.
In the first quarter of 2026, fundraising totaled $4.59 billion, down 46.7% quarter over quarter. The average deal size was $36 million, 4.4 times the median of $8 million. The report’s conclusion is that capital has already voted with cash: toward the top of the market, away from the tail, leaving the middle without either large financing rounds or secondary-market valuation support.
The death list is simply that capital structure showing up over time.
Storj’s bankruptcy case could test token treatment in court
Storj stands out from the broader list. On July 26, Storj Labs filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of West Virginia, case number 5:26-bk-00512.
The company said the filing was a voluntary reorganization, not an operational shutdown. The storage network would continue to function, parent company Inveniam would keep supporting the business, and the goal was to clean up legacy debt tied to earlier acquisitions, separate non-core units and refocus on decentralized storage.
The most unusual element appeared in its public letter to the community: Storj said it would explore a court-approved mechanism allowing STORJ token holders to participate in equity of the reorganized company.
That would be unusual because tokens have long occupied an awkward legal position. They are typically neither equity nor debt, and in bankruptcy cases they often fit nowhere cleanly. If Storj does manage to let utility-token holders exchange that status for equity under court supervision, it could push forward the legal treatment of crypto assets.
Storj also said the distribution mechanism and participation terms had not yet been determined. Everything would depend on a reorganization plan being submitted to, and approved by, the court.
For an eight-year-old project, the report suggests, the most lasting contribution may end up being a legal precedent rather than the storage network itself.
A lagging indicator, not proof of a bottom
The report’s conclusion is straightforward: a rising death list shows that liquidation and cleanup are underway, but it does not prove the process is over.
Looking back at 2022, Bitcoin bottomed after the collapse of FTX in November, while many of the 250 projects recorded by RootData shut down in the following six to twelve months. Closures take time. Layoffs, liquidation, withdrawals and legal work all come after the price move. Using project deaths to time a market bottom, the report says, is roughly like using last year’s newspaper to forecast tomorrow’s weather.
Instead, it points to three data sets worth watching.
ETF flows
U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw about $5 billion in net outflows in the second quarter of 2026, the largest quarterly outflow since the products launched in January 2024. CoinShares’ James Butterfill estimated that cumulative outflows reached about $8 billion over the eight weeks starting in early May, or about 8% of ETF assets under management, a scale the report says is comparable to the 2018 cycle bottom.
Conditions shifted between July 14 and July 23, when spot ETFs posted net inflows for seven straight trading sessions totaling $981.2 million. The report does not treat one seven-day streak as confirmation of a trend reversal, but it says the run at least shows selling pressure is no longer one-way.
Median fundraising size
Total funding can be skewed by one or two very large rounds. The median cannot. The report treats the $8 million median in the first quarter of 2026 as the market’s real level. If that figure stops falling for two consecutive quarters, it would suggest that financing conditions for early-stage projects have bottomed.
How much mid-tier cleanup is left
Mid-sized exchanges, second-tier Layer 2 networks and DeFi protocols dependent on token incentives are the three categories the report says are still being cleared out at a faster pace. Four exchanges exited in July alone. Until that phase is finished, the report argues, it is too early to call a bottom for the industry.
By that reading, the 2026 death list is less a buy-the-dip signal than a receipt for an ongoing cleanup. What it tells the market is that business models sustained mainly by token incentives and new-user inflows are being rejected at a structural level. The companies that remain will need real revenue.