Linera said on Sept. 9 that its $LNRA community sale had ended after raising a total of $848,000 from 617 participants across 69 countries, below the $1.5 million minimum target. The team said the funds had been returned to participants’ wallets.
The result contrasts with Linera’s venture backing. The project has support from firms including Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, and has raised about $12 million across two funding rounds. In the community sale, Linera set the token price at $0.16 and promoted incentives that could bring the effective acquisition cost down to about $0.02, while also using a badge-based bonus system to attract users. Even with those terms, the round did not meet the minimum threshold.
From Diem-era roots to a short-cycle prediction product
According to official materials, Linera is a Layer 1 blockchain built on a microchain architecture, where each user and application can run its own lightweight execution chain in parallel.
From 2022 to 2023, Linera was positioned as part of a new generation of high-performance blockchains, with an emphasis on real-time applications and lower latency. Founder Mathieu Baudet previously worked on FastPay-related research at Meta, and the project has described Linera as an attempt to turn that body of work into a deployable chain.
Meta also had Diem during that period, the successor to the earlier Libra stablecoin effort, which was later halted by regulators. After the Diem team broke up, some members went on to create Aptos and Sui using Move, while Linera chose Rust.
Two fundraising rounds, but no mainnet after more than three years
Linera completed a $6 million seed round in June 2022 with backing from a16z, Tribe Capital, Cygni Capital, and Kima Ventures. In August 2023, it raised another $6 million. A16z joined that round as well, alongside Borderless Capital, GSR, DFG, Matrixport Ventures, and Flow Traders. The two rounds together came to about $12 million.
The mainnet, however, has still not launched more than three years later. On the product side, Linera later introduced Linera Markets, a short-cycle onchain prediction market offering one-minute up-or-down rounds across assets including BTC, ETH, and SOL.
In August, Baudet reset the project’s public framing. He wrote that fast-cycle prediction markets, such as five-minute BTC up-or-down rounds, had proven more popular across the industry than expected. Linera then shifted its one-minute market from being treated as a product experiment to becoming a core outward-facing narrative, tying it to a model in which the chain builds its own application and captures application revenue.
The project said Linera Markets had been running on testnet for more than 25 weeks and had generated about 85 million transactions from more than 50,000 users. A separate sales page said daily participation exceeded 8,000 people.
Community sale structure and valuation
The community offering opened soon after. Pre-registration began in late August, the sale window opened on Sept. 1, and it had originally been set to end on Sept. 8 before being extended by 10 hours. The minimum target was $1.5 million and the hard cap was $8 million.
According to the official sale page, participants first had to complete identity verification through Sonar and then use USDC on Base to buy in. The minimum ticket size was $100, and the cap for a single wallet in the open pool was about $100,000. U.S. investors had to meet accredited investor requirements and accept a 12-month lock-up, while some jurisdictions could not register.
Testnet badges were tied to a separate airdrop worth about 1% of the total token supply. In the sale itself, badge holders were also placed into a reserved pool with priority allocation, while other users entered the open pool and would be prorated in the event of oversubscription.
The sale price was $0.16, implying a fully diluted valuation of $160 million. Buyers in the first $1.6 million of purchases could obtain Founder status. After the mainnet launch, and after completing one trade in the official app before the token generation event, they would be eligible to receive seven additional tokens for each token bought from a community reserve allocation, bringing the effective cost to about $0.02 per token.
Weak demand and a full refund
Even with those incentives, the sale drew a weak response. By the second day after opening, subscriptions were only about 1.1% of the hard cap. Some users questioned the project’s earlier comparisons with leading trading applications and its attempt to align the sale valuation with venture-round pricing.
Others said the rules were hard to parse, especially around who qualified for extra tokens and when those tokens would unlock. A number of Asian addresses were reportedly blocked during the KYC process. Some KOLs and onchain commentators said that if Linera had launched in the same cycle as Aptos and Sui, it might have been viewed more as a high-upside airdrop play, but retail investors are now less willing to buy into an institutional narrative on its own.
In the end, the sale raised $848,000, equal to about 56.6% of the minimum target and about 10.6% of the hard cap. Linera confirmed in its announcement that the round had failed to reach the minimum requirement.
Chief Product Officer Ryan Trost said the team has around five people and limited expenses. He said the round was meant to distribute tokens as widely as possible among core users willing to participate before the project had begun generating revenue. He added that average purchase sizes among testnet users came in above the team’s expectations, but the final tally still meant the round had to be refunded.
Linera is not alone in a weaker primary market
Linera’s outcome fits a wider downturn in crypto fundraising. RootData statistics cited in the report show that disclosed crypto industry financing from January to August 2026 totaled about $11.97 billion, down about 52.9% year over year. Of that, roughly $11.521 billion came from the primary market, down about 14.6%, while the number of financing events fell to 329, a drop of about 31.7%. The figures suggest that headline funding totals are still being held up by a relatively small number of large deals, while institutional deployment has become more concentrated.
Public sales accessible to retail have shrunk even more sharply. Public sale tracking data showed that ICOs, IDOs, and IEOs raised a combined roughly $390 million across 105 deals in the first quarter of 2026. By early June, the figure had dropped to about $58 million across 37 deals, with both fundraising size and deal count well below first-quarter levels. For comparison, the first quarter of 2025 had reached about $849 million across 429 deals.
That points to a market with less capital willing to take early-stage uncertainty and more scrutiny over which projects deserve it.
Post-listing performance has changed how buyers look at public sales
Several high-profile projects have also turned in disappointing secondary-market results.
MegaETH was once bid up to a $6 billion FDV in the pre-market. When it formally listed on April 30 this year, opening FDV was between $1.6 billion and $2 billion, and its peak came on the first day of trading. By press time, the token price had fallen to $0.037 and FDV had dropped to $370 million, down 80% from the high.
Monad raised about $225 million in a 2024 institutional round led by Paradigm, then completed a public sale of about $269 million on Coinbase in November 2025. After launch, its FDV briefly climbed to nearly $4.7 billion. It has since fallen back to around $2.3 billion, a decline of 52% from the peak.
Plasma used the same Sonar public sale system as Linera. It targeted $50 million and ended up oversubscribed at $373 million, priced at a $500 million FDV. On its first day of trading, the token hit an all-time high of $1.68, then slid steadily. By press time it was at about $0.084, down 95% from the peak. Its fully diluted valuation stood at about $650 million, meaning nearly all of the premium built after listing had been erased.
In earlier cycles, the primary market could sell a story. If the narrative was loud enough and liquidity was hot enough, a public sale could fill or even oversubscribe. This year, though, public-sale size and deal count have both declined. Linera came to market with an old-cycle venture valuation and a new product pitch, but the market no longer prices tokens simply on promised upside.
Chains are trying to build products themselves
The shift is not limited to projects that have not launched yet. Existing chains are under pressure too. As better-backed new networks keep entering the market, older chains increasingly look like providers of commoditized block space. Users and fees are being pulled toward a smaller set of networks with real applications, and it has become harder to sell a fresh valuation story using throughput claims and zero-knowledge proof language alone.
Some chain teams have responded by building products directly.
On Sept. 8, Ethereum layer-2 network Scroll posted an update on its governance forum saying it planned to move gradually from a general-purpose zkEVM toward a specialized network built around its AI product Compass, with a transition period of about nine months. The team said this was not yet a formal proposal, and that any later measures involving network restructuring or DAO approval would be submitted separately.
Its disclosed product suite includes Compass for end users, Compass API connected to more than 30 large language models, the privacy layer CENO, and the payment and settlement product USX. The team said CENO had already engaged with more than 30 potential customers, with 12 in proof-of-concept work, while Compass remained in the early stage of consumer validation.
Scroll is not alone. MegaETH has shut down the more speculative MegaMafia accelerator and shifted toward building consumer applications in-house, while using revenue from its USDm stablecoin product for buybacks and burns. Arbitrum, Sei, and Sophon have also discussed pulling applications and fees back into their own ecosystems.
Xiao Feng of Wanxiang Blockchain wrote this year that about 90% of crypto projects still lack clear users, recurring revenue, or regulatory compliance. In his view, the next phase will be judged more on revenue, resilience, and links to the real economy, while white papers and performance metrics alone are no longer enough to support valuations.
That is the backdrop for Linera’s failed community round. Buyers are no longer paying up just because a story is large. They are paying closer attention to whether a project has users and whether it can generate revenue.