Do you remember the bull market of 2021?

That year, Bitcoin broke through $60,000, Ethereum reached an all-time high, NFT avatars were sold for millions of dollars, and the concept of the metaverse made everyone believe we were on the brink of an internet revolution. The cryptocurrency industry experienced an unprecedented wave of financing. Venture capital firms rushed in, fearing they would miss the next hundredfold project. In that fervent era, it seemed that any project labeled "Web3" could easily raise tens of millions of dollars.

According to Venture Capital analysis, crypto technology startups raised $25.2 billion that year, a staggering 713% increase from $3.1 billion in 2020. However, four years later, when we look back at the more than 400 high-funding projects, only a very few remain standing.

Most projects have vanished without a trace; they either announced they were ceasing operations, pivoted to other projects, were hacked and never recovered, suffered significant negative impacts after the collapse of FTX, or became dormant zombie projects.

Note: This table includes 67 representative cases from the top 400 projects by funding amount in 2021 that have closed, gone to zero, or have low operational activity, with a total funding amount exceeding $5 billion. The funding amount statistics are limited to the single-year funding of 2021 and do not include funding rounds from 2020 or earlier or after 2022. Projects marked in red in the table indicate that their current market value is below the total funding amount in 2021.

The most devastating disaster occurred in the centralized finance platform sector. FTX, once seen as Binance's biggest competitor and having raised $1.32 billion, collapsed in November 2022, with founder SBF sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. Almost simultaneously, Celsius Network, a crypto lending platform that raised $750 million and promised users an 18% annual yield on deposits, saw its token CEL plummet from $8 to $0.02, evaporating 99.73% of its value. Names like BlockFi, Voyager Digital, Babel Finance, and Prime Trust, which once represented the "normalization" and "institutionalization" of crypto finance, collectively raised over $500 million but fell like dominoes during the liquidity crisis of 2022.

If the collapse of centralized platforms was due to the fraudulent nature of their business models, then the collective demise of NFT and metaverse projects felt more like a nationwide disillusionment.

In 2021, everyone was talking about virtual land, digital art, and Play-to-Earn games. Axie Infinity raised $159.5 million with its "play-to-earn" concept, and its token AXS once soared to $164.9, with in-game pet NFTs even being speculated to hundreds of thousands of dollars each. In developing countries like the Philippines, countless people quit their jobs to "farm" full-time, viewing Axie as an opportunity to change their fortunes. However, when the game’s economic model collapsed, AXS plummeted 99.49% to $0.85, and those players who invested their life savings ultimately realized it was just a Ponzi game that required a continuous influx of new players.

The representative project of the metaverse concept, The Sandbox, raised $93 million, and its virtual land NFTs were sold out in 2021, with the SAND token reaching $8.4. But three years later, this so-called metaverse is empty, with only a few participants in the occasional events held, and while the official Twitter is still being updated, the comment section is already desolate. Ironically, most NFT platforms focused on music and art have become zombie projects.

Projecting the lessons of 2021 onto today reveals some harsh truths: most projects are products of cycles, and truly valuable projects do not exceed 5%, with this 5% typically only identifiable at the lowest points of a bear market. The wheels of history roll forward, 2025 is approaching its end, and a new cycle will begin. When the new tide recedes, how many of today’s projects will be left wearing swimsuits?

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