Crypto’s easy-money era is ending as failures pile up

Crypto’s boom-time funding model is now surfacing in a wave of shutdowns, bankruptcies and projects that have effectively disappeared, according to Ryan Kirkley, CEO of Global Settlement Network. CoinDesk, citing RootData figures, said more than 100 crypto projects have shut down, filed for bankruptcy or vanished in 2026. Falling altcoin prices, depleted token treasuries and tighter venture funding are exposing businesses that never built sustainable revenue. Kirkley said many of those failures were set in motion during the 2020-21 fundraising frenzy. Galaxy Research said venture investors put about $4 billion into 355 crypto and blockchain deals in the first quarter of 2026, roughly half the capital deployed in the fourth quarter of 2025, even though deal count fell only 16%. That gap suggests the pullback was driven mainly by fewer mega-rounds. He said the problem starts with valuation. "If you raise at too high a valuation, you guarantee yourself a negative outcome," he told CoinDesk. In his view, many projects raised huge rounds despite little revenue and no realistic path to profitability, then became dependent on becoming multibillion-dollar businesses just to justify the next financing. Crypto’s fundraising culture made that worse. A large raise can lift a token and draw retail attention, which creates an incentive to present financing in the best possible light. Kirkley also said Global Settlement Network has seen investors fail to ultimately fund signed commitments, showing that announced rounds and actual cash received can be very different. The same tension shows up in governance. Kirkley said token ownership does not necessarily mean active participation, and governance votes can make it harder for struggling protocols to pivot quickly. "Token holders do not mean active participants in your ecosystem," he said. He sees the market sorting winners from losers more clearly now. Stablecoins, neobanks and institutional-grade wallet and settlement infrastructure are emerging as the stronger areas, while social tokens, memecoins and parts of Web3 gaming face a harsher reckoning. Bitcoin is part of that backdrop. Kirkley described the market as a "soft bear market" and said $61,200 is a critical support zone for BTC. If that level fails, he warned, leveraged traders could be forced to sell and the price could move toward $41,000. Bitcoin was trading around $64,100 at publication time, and CoinDesk showed BTC at $64,177.56. Even so, Kirkley said crypto is finally getting the adoption it spent years waiting for. Over the past month, he said he met representatives of seven governments interested in blockchain technology. Global Settlement Network itself is pitching regulated infrastructure for digital currencies, tokenized assets and cross-border settlement. The catch, he said, is that this adoption looks less and less like crypto’s original vision. Governments and institutions want lower costs and more modern financial rails, but not necessarily through decentralized networks. Crypto may be seeing mass adoption at last, even if the decentralized-money outcome that once defined the market is not the one the market ultimately chose.