Crypto is going through a massive dot-com style shakeout as over 100 projects fold in 2026

The 2026 wave is structurally different from crypto's last major collapse in 2022, when fraud and interconnected leverage brought down Terra, Celsius and FTX in rapid succession. This time, there is no single point of contagion; instead there is an industry-wide reckoning that is unwinding all of the optimism from when crypto-friendly U.S. president Donald Trump took office in early 2025.

The token-as-revenue model breaks down

Most of the projects now winding down were never generating revenue in the traditional sense. They paid engineers in tokens, subsidized liquidity in tokens and funded security audits in tokens. As long as those tokens held their dollar value, the system worked. Unfortunately, the vast majority of altcoins lost between 70% and 90% of their value during the recent bear market, making runway calculations wildly inaccurate.

Tally, a DAO tooling platform that powered governance for over 500 protocols including Uniswap, Arbitrum and ENS, processed more than $1 billion in payments and helped secure up to $80 billion in onchain value. It still couldn't survive. "There isn't a venture-backed business in governance tooling for decentralized protocols, at least not yet," co-founder Dennison Bertram wrote when announcing the shutdown.

Step Finance, a Solana portfolio tracker and analytics platform, raised enough to build a real product. In January, a phishing attack on an executive's device drained 261,854 SOL, worth around $35 million, from the protocol's multisig wallet. Rescue capital never arrived and while the team explored "every possible path forward, including financing and acquisition opportunities," nothing worked and the platform shut down in February.