Web3 Startup Failures

Raised $100M for ZK privacy then shut down the entire team overnight.

The AWS of Web3 — raised at $10.2B then laid off as the Web3 developer market contracted

King of Optimism NFTs, dethroned by a market that evaporated overnight.

The Firebase of Web3 ran out of developers to serve.

The NFT marketplace that launched with $1B in week-one volume — 95% of which was wash trading by its own users

Web3 Substack turned into a ghost town when the NFT hype evaporated.

Built governance tools for DAOs that couldn't afford governance tools.

Mintable raised $13M backed by Mark Cuban but couldn't survive a 97% NFT market volume collapse.

The decentralized social network that raised $200M from Sequoia and a16z, then watched DESO token fall 97%

€680M Series B. Then the NFT market evaporated and so did the players

K-pop NFT fan tokens met the crypto winter and nobody was buying.

Another blockchain API startup crushed between Alchemy and a bear market.

Built the standards, forgot to build the business.

Decentralized indexing for 20 chains, sustained by a token price that fell 97%.

The $4B NFT empire that wasted $150M in gas fees and still couldn't build a working metaverse.

CEO arrested in China, keys taken, $220M in user funds gone forever.

Raised $725M to tokenize gaming economies no gamer asked for.

The Bored Apes empire — ApeCoin, Otherdeeds, lawsuits, and a $4B valuation that didn't survive the bear

The peer-to-peer Bitcoin marketplace. The co-founder sued the company. The company sued the co-founder. Then it shut down.

Blockchain was the product. Crypto's collapse made it the liability.

The retail crypto broker that lent $654M to Three Arrows Capital and never got it back.

The DeFi stablecoin protocol that was drained of $182M in 13 seconds via a governance flash loan attack

Five years and three complete pivots couldn't find a business in DeFi.

Korea's biggest blockchain game token lost 80% in 48 hours after lying about token supply.

The crypto exchange that used customer funds as a personal ATM.

The NFT moment that made $200M in a week — then the moment passed

The Ethereum privacy protocol that became the first smart contract to be sanctioned by the US Treasury

Cent sold the most famous NFT ever, then collapsed under a tsunami of counterfeits it couldn't control.

The move-to-earn app that turned running shoes into NFTs — until the tokenomics made it mathematically impossible

The Axie Infinity sidechain was hacked for 625M dollars in March 2022 in the largest crypto theft in history, carried out by North Korean Lazarus Group.

Crypto brokerage brought down by a $650M loan to Three Arrows Capital

Crypto lender promised 18% yield, delivered a federal indictment

The cross-chain bridge that was drained of $190M in hours by a crowd of copycat exploiters reusing the same bug

Raised $46M, angered the whole Solana dev community, then laid off 45% in 10 weeks.

The Horizon Bridge of the Harmony blockchain was hacked for 100M dollars in June 2022 and the chain never recovered its ecosystem.

The $1.7B DeFi DAO whose treasury manager was revealed to be the co-founder of the collapsed QuadrigaCX exchange

The 19.5% APY DeFi protocol that built the house of cards that brought down Terra and $40B in user wealth

Brazil's original bitcoin exchange. FTX and Binance arrived. Foxbit couldn't compete.

Token-gated content is only valuable when someone wants the token.

Algorithmic stablecoin wiped $40B in 72 hours in a death spiral

One spoofed Aave contract address wiped out $15M and ended a DeFi dream.

Decentralized democracy: a protocol nobody voted to fund.

The anonymous algorithmic stablecoin that crashed to $0.04 in 60 days.

Mexico's first bitcoin exchange. Shut down before the Fintech Law arrived.

DeFi structured products protocol that raised $8.8M, peaked at $250M TVL, and restructured to zero user activity.

Recur raised $50M to build licensed NFT collections for major brands — then the NFT market collapsed and took the business thesis with it

Candy Digital raised 100 million dollars from SoftBank at a 1.5 billion dollar valuation to put MLB trading cards on the blockchain — and shut down in early 2023 after the NFT market lost 97 percent of its trading volume.

JavaScript-based blockchain platform that raised $6M ICO in 2016 and faded into irrelevance as Ethereum dominated.

DeSo raised 200 million dollars from Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz to build a blockchain where social media posts are tokenized on-chain — and never found more than a few thousand active users in a world where people were perfectly happy posting on Twitter for free.

Creator economy web3 platform that let influencers launch personal tokens and raised 57 million dollars before the crypto winter made creator coins worthless.

Leading DeFi derivatives exchange that abandoned US operations under regulatory pressure.

STEPN built a move-to-earn app that paid users in crypto tokens for running — reaching 700,000 daily users and 122 million dollars in monthly revenue before the Ponzi dynamics collapsed and the token lost 98 percent of its value in three months.

South African NFT profile picture project that launched at peak NFT mania and collapsed with the market.