DeFi projects that survived the fallout from the Terra and FTX collapses in 2022 are dying out in 2026. But analysts say it’s not a case of industry consolidation — but the opposite.
When DeFi dashboard Zapper announced this month that it would shut down after nearly seven years, it joined a growing list of decentralized finance projects that have folded in 2026.
Bitcoin DeFi platform Botanix, Solana portfolio tracker Step Finance, DeFi analytics platform Parsec and DEX aggregator Odos Protocol also wound down or are winding down this year after multiple market cycles.
The carnage isn’t limited to DeFi — RootData has tracked 101 “dead” crypto projects in total this year as of July 26 — but it accounts for more than half the cadavers.
Is it simply a case of bear market blues, or is there more to it than meets the eye?
Botanix’s founders pointed to weak demand when announcing the platform’s closure, and told Cointelegraph in June that onchain activity consolidating around a few venues like Hyperliquid and big centralized exchanges hastened Botanix’s decline.
While complaints the overall industry is consolidating into a fewer, larger venues are common, Artemis Research’s Alex Weseley tells Magazine that’s not the case in DeFi:
So, why are projects that survived the collapse of Terra, the implosion of FTX and the grip of Chokepoint 2.0 shutting down today? If the 2022 bear market didn’t kill these DeFi protocols, what is it about the 2026 market structure that is finishing them off?
According to Artemis data, concentration across tracked DeFi protocols has actually drifted lower since 2024.
And while each major sector still has one dominant player like Uniswap in decentralized exchanges, Aave in lending and Jupiter in perpetuals by locked capital, “every one of those leaders holds a smaller share of its sector now than it did two years ago,” Weseley explains.
Liquidity concentration by sector (TVL Herfindahl index). Source: Artemis
He argues that onchain activity has shifted into different corners of the crypto economy rather than leaving the ecosystem altogether.
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