Unlike DappRadar, Zapper actually has many opportunities.

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

On July 8, 2026, Zapper co-founder Seb Audet posted a brief announcement on X: the platform will completely shut down on August 3, with the official website, mobile application, and API services all going offline.

Last November, the news of DappRadar shutting down made countless veterans in the crypto community sigh. Now, a once-celebrated project that had 2 million monthly active users, processed over $13 billion in transactions, and raised a total of $16.5 million in funding has reached a dead end.

In 2019, Zapper's precursor, DeFiZap, won at the DeFi hackathon hosted by Kyber. At that time, DeFi was still in its infancy, with the entire sector's TVL reaching only about $667 million. In May 2020, DeFiZap merged with DeFiSnap, and Zapper was officially born. In Seb's words, he was exploring DeFi at the time, and the creation of Zapper was initially just his desire to develop a simple portfolio tracker, never expecting it to expand to such a scale.

In June 2020, Compound launched the COMP token, kicking off the "DeFi Summer" that changed the industry landscape. Within three months, DeFi's TVL skyrocketed from around $700 million to over $13 billion, with retail investors flocking into yield farming. In an era where funds were scattered across various protocols, the demand for a unified dashboard to view positions arose, and Zapper, which could monitor cross-protocol holdings, LPs, and yields in real-time after wallet connections, naturally gained traction in the community.

The DeFi boom allowed Zapper to grow rapidly. At the beginning of 2020, it completed a $1.5 million seed round funding, with institutions like Framework Ventures and ParaFi Capital participating. In May 2021, during the market's most frenzied period, Zapper completed a $15 million Series A funding, with Framework Ventures continuing to lead the round, and prominent investors like Mark Cuban, Ashton Kutcher's Sound Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures joining in.

At its peak, Zapper covered 14 chains, over 450 DeFi protocols, and more than 7,000 tokens, with monthly active users surpassing 2 million and total transaction volume exceeding $13 billion. Its "Zap" feature allowed users to complete complex multi-step DeFi operations with a single transaction, becoming a core differentiating feature of the product.

But the problem is, the traffic did not convert into sustainable revenue. Zapper's revenue model primarily relied on extracting small fees from DEX aggregation trading, but the competition in the aggregator space is extremely fierce, continuously compressing the fee margin. Meanwhile, maintaining a data index and real-time update system covering multiple chains and hundreds of protocols requires a continual investment of substantial engineering resources and infrastructure costs.

On the other hand, while DeFi is still developing, the trend is not diversification but rather the concentration of funds and traffic towards leading protocols. After experiencing a brief trough in 2022, DeFi has still been making strides in recent years, but due to the lack of attractive yields and airdrop expectations, user numbers have not increased. Zapper's features are more geared towards 2C, the number of users has decreased, DeFi no longer requires complex operations, and competition among DEX aggregators is too intense. At that point, the demand behind Zapper's strongest moat was clearly weakening.

Zapper was not unaware of the limitations of pure tool products. It went through several rounds of attempts to pivot, but none were successful. In September 2021, Zapper launched a points system based on on-chain interaction behavior, allowing users to accumulate points through actions like check-ins, cross-chain transactions, and exchange them for NFTs, with over 100,000 addresses participating in the minting. According to OpenSea data, the NFT series achieved a total trading volume of over 1,200 ETH, valued at about $5 million at the time. However, over time, the price of this NFT series ultimately went to zero, and the points system was not continued.

In October 2023, Zapper launched the on-chain social application Chainchat, requiring users to purchase "shares" of channels to join group chats. The subsequently released V2 version repositioned the product as a "Web3 exploration tool", attempting to extend its scope from DeFi to NFTs, DAOs, and on-chain accounts. In June 2024, Zapper announced the launch of Zapper Protocol, planning to issue ZAP tokens, aiming to build an open protocol to incentivize users to interpret and interpret on-chain information.

However, these attempts ultimately failed to turn the tide. The ZAP token was never officially issued, the protocol plans were shelved as the market turned bearish, and Chainchat quietly faded from users' sight.

Many tool-type products born in 2019 and 2020 have come to their end in the past two years. These products "each have their own way of dying," with DappRadar being a typical example of being abandoned by the times. When all resources are converging towards leading protocols, a lack of an environment where a hundred flowers bloom makes it ineffective no matter how comprehensive the projects you catalog are.

Although Zapper was also affected by changes in the space, it was more a result of its own strategic missteps in its pivot.

A portfolio tracker is not a high-barrier product, but the data costs behind it are a hard expenditure. Without the ability to charge for this service itself, there must be a strongly related product that can generate revenue. The DEX aggregator and the "Zap" feature that can execute multi-step operations with one click are inherently options with hard demand, but Zapper seems to have focused less on products that can generate revenue and more on the cost side.

Attracting traffic to revenue-generating features through portfolio tracking functionalities made sense in the early stages, but as user funds gradually concentrated on a few protocols and competition including DeBank increased, Zapper did not timely shift its mindset. The subsequent attempts clearly show that Zapper did not escape the 2C mindset, continuously spinning in the "dead end" of blockchain thinking while developing C-end products.

These 2C products sound grand in narrative, but they did not target existing pain points, instead trying to create demand out of thin air. Persisting in the wrong direction for years reflects how substantial the DeFi boom was at the time. From Seb's farewell letter stating, "evaluated various options and made ample attempts at some of them, ultimately realizing that an orderly end of operations is the best choice," it is apparent that even the proud portfolio tracker has no one to take over in the current market, and even pivoting this part towards Nansen or Arkham might ultimately lead to a neutral outcome of being acquired.

The aforementioned DeBank has also contracted its support for asset tracking, cutting back on some low-activity chains. However, DeBank has flagship products like Rabby Wallet, and with double the funding of Zapper, it has more leverage, and its revenue is also more stable. If you look up evaluations of Rabby Wallet on X, you will find that many consider Rabby Wallet's experience and functionality better than MetaMask in the EVM-compatible chain space.

In my view, Zapper's exit was not entirely due to "blindness," but more a consequence of excessive faith in blockchain fundamentalism. In the competitive arena of business, immersing oneself too deeply in one's world while ignoring changes in the objective market environment is fatal, and Zapper has sounded the alarm for tool-type products still active in the market: DappRadar could not broaden its revenue channels due to its own sector limitations, but if there were opportunities for pivoting, it should not cling to past accolades.