In 2026, more than 40 DeFi protocols shut down 🙄
But almost none of them did so because of hacks.
2022 was a crisis of greed: Celsius, FTX, Terra - fraud and leverage.
2026 is different.
These are legitimate teams with real users and a product that simply ran out of money.
For years, mid-cap DeFi projects survived not on fees, but on the rising price of their own token in the treasury.
They paid developers in tokens.
When the token’s price dropped, the model collapsed.
This model is not viable.
The market crash is a fair audit of DeFi: it reveals who has real revenue and who had just a pretty architecture without a business.
I wonder how many protocols will survive this test?
