Author: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher

1. Shutdown Wave and Siphoning Effect: The Ice and Fire of Public Chain Track

The crypto infrastructure track is experiencing an unprecedented structural collapse.

According to public information, in the past three months, Scroll, Harmony, Moonbeam, Saga, Lisk, Secret Network, and others like Sophon have announced the shutdown of their blockchains, transforming into AI or payment tracks. In addition, this year, projects that once held positions on the track such as Loopring, Dango, DFK Chain, Botanix, Over Protocol, Mint, Intergaze, Pryzm and others have successively announced complete cessation of operations. From veteran ZK Rollup players to Bitcoin ecosystem Layer2, from application chain pioneers to modular public chains, projects of different positions are collectively exiting the underlying public chain arena.

This is a "zeroing" exit with no retreat: with the mainnet shutdown, if there are no migration or redemption arrangements, on-chain applications, assets, and ecological data will face the risk of returning to zero, and years of technological accumulation, community operations, and ecological investments may go to waste. Behind the resolute choice is the project team's complete pessimism about the prospects of the general public chain track, and the continuously deteriorating survival environment is compressing their maneuvering space.

In the deep adjustment of the industry over the past 1-2 years, these projects have long been trapped in the death spiral of ecological decline: on-chain activity has plummeted, existing applications have successively stopped operation, users and funds continue to flow out, and most veteran Layer1/2 tokens have dropped over 90% from their historical highs, with market confidence being thoroughly depressed. More devastating is the failure of the business model—underlying operations, technical iterations, and ecological incentives all require continued high investments, but with the ecological depletion, transaction fee income has nearly returned to zero, and project parties have lost their ability to generate revenue, relying only on reserves to continue their existence.

As if adding insult to injury, many Layer1/2 projects have recently encountered hacker attacks. According to monitoring by security agencies, there were a total of 182 security incidents in the entire industry in the first half of 2026, resulting in losses of approximately 956 million dollars, with the number of incidents increasing by more than fifty percent year-on-year. The frequent occurrence of security incidents further erodes the already fragile user trust and depletes the already tight financial reserves of the project parties. For small and medium public chains on the brink of survival, a hacker attack can become the last straw that breaks the camel's back, directly pushing the project towards shutdown.

Against the backdrop of bankruptcy in both survival and narrative, transforming has become one of the few pathways. Among them, the payment track represents a relatively real cash flow and compliance breakthrough, while AI is one of the few narratives in the current capital market that is willing to provide high premiums, naturally becoming the two core directions for this group of teams to transform.

What truly ends the fantasy of veteran public chains is the strong rise of emerging traffic-type public chains and extreme resource siphoning; the explosion of Robinhood Chain is a hallmark event of this trend. The current crypto market is staging extreme polarization: on one side there is Robinhood Chain and other leading ecosystems bustling with activity, with a large number of newly established applications and token projects rushing in; on the other side, traditional public chains are sparse, with few new projects entering for months, and existing ecosystems continue to shrink, resulting in a stark contrast between the enthusiasm of new and old tracks.

The core driving force behind this polarization is that RWA and tokenized stocks have become one of the core narratives of this round of industry boom, while Robinhood Chain, backed by traditional retail brokerage giants, holds inherent advantages in compliance user base, financial asset resources, and transaction scenario accumulation. When a new project can choose to build in a mature ecosystem with 800 million dollars in TVL and hundreds of thousands of active addresses, or deploy on a chain with fewer than three daily active users, the choice is almost effortless.

Statistics from RootData confirm this extreme pattern: over 93% of projects newly established in crypto in 2026 are concentrated in a few ecosystems like Robinhood Chain, Solana, Base, Hyperliquid, Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Arc. Eighty percent of the entire industry's incremental capital, developer traffic, and user flow are divided among a few leading public chains, while hundreds of veteran public chains can only compete for less than 5% of project resources, with their survival space being extremely compressed.

This wave of traditional finance and licensed platforms entering the public chain is also accelerating, with Circle's Arc, Kraken's Ink, and Upbit's GIWA lurking. They also come with compliance qualifications, user traffic, and financial scenarios, which will further squeeze the survival space of traditional general public chains and push the industry's decluttering pace to accelerate.

2. The Endgame Has Arrived: Where is the Future of the Public Chain Track?

Looking at the longer timeline, the essence of this major retreat is the failure of the public chain value capture logic.

In the last cycle, the industry believed in a simple hypothesis: as long as a faster, cheaper, and more decentralized chain is produced, users and funds will naturally gather, and the tokens will appreciate accordingly. This hypothesis supported the birth and valuation of hundreds of Layer1/2 chains.

But reality gave a contrary answer—technical correctness does not equal user correctness. When liquidity, distribution channels, and compliance entry points are concentrated in the hands of a few giants, the so-called "performance advantage" and "modular narrative" of independent public chains crumble in the face of actual user acquisition costs.

The new narrative that replaces it is payment and stablecoins. Circle's Arc, Kraken's Ink, and Robinhood Chain are essentially not "public chains for the sake of public chains," but treat chains as a settlement channel for their own financial businesses. Chains are no longer the goal but a means; tokens are no longer the core of value capture, but stablecoins and real transactions are.

This also explains why AI has become another transformation pathway. When a chain has neither users nor revenue, repackaging a pre-established engineering team into the narrative of "AI infrastructure" can at least yield some respite in the financing market—though whether this can truly take off remains another story that needs time to validate.

Looking ahead, the public chain track will present two clear trends:

First,the head concentration pattern is completely solidified, with the Matthew Effect continuing to intensify. Head ecosystems represented by Robinhood Chain will continue to monopolize incremental resources in the industry through their advantages in traffic, capital, and brand, while the ecological scale and network effects will become increasingly strong. Many small and medium general public chains will completely lose their survival space; shutdown, transformation, and acquisition will become the norm, and ultimately, only a few leading players will remain in the general public chain track.

Second,scene segmentation replaces general narratives, and vertical public chains become mainstream. The era of "one chain serving all scenarios" has ended; future public chains must be deeply bound to specific business scenarios, such as payment settlement, AI computing networks, RWA asset issuance, derivative trading, etc. In fact, many veteran public chains’ transformations to AI and payment tracks are essentially abandoning the general underlying narrative and turning to vertical scenarios for in-depth cultivation. Polygon's transition to stablecoin payments follows the same path.

Moving from technological idealism to business realism is an inevitability for the development of the crypto industry.

3. Conclusion

From a flourishing diversity to collective shutdown, the fate of veteran Layer1/2 chains is a microcosm of ten years of development in the crypto industry.

Looking back at history, nearly every technological revolution has gone through a similar script: capital frenzy, overproduction, severe clearing, and rearrangement of patterns. The public chain track is no exception—when the barrier to "creating chains" is so low that anyone can do it, the resultant oversupply is destined to end with a large number of shutdowns.

What can truly survive this round of reshuffle are not those chains with the "most elegant technology," but those that hold distribution capabilities, real demands, and compliance moats. The explosion of Robinhood Chain merely exposes this already established rule for all to see.

For the independent public chains that are still insisting, the window of opportunity is running out. They must either find irreplaceable differentiated value or gracefully turn away—just as these pioneers have done.

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