2021 Star Projects Survival Record: Who’s Left After the Initial Investment Rush?

Do you still remember the bull market of 2021?

That year, bitcoin broke through $60,000, ethereum reached an all-time high, NFT avatars were selling for millions of dollars, and the metaverse concept made everyone believe we were standing on the eve of an internet revolution. The cryptocurrency industry experienced an unprecedented financing frenzy. Venture capital institutions rushed in, afraid of missing the next 100x project. In that era of mania, 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 the $3.1 billion in 2020. However, four years later, when we look back at the more than 400 highly funded projects, only a handful are still standing strong.

Most projects have already faded away. They either announced the cessation of operations, pivoted to other projects, were crippled after being hacked, suffered huge negative impacts following the collapse of FTX, or simply became zombie projects lying dormant.

Note: This table includes 67 representative cases from the top 400 projects by financing amount in 2021 that have already shut down, gone to zero, or have low operational activity, with a total financing amount exceeding $5 billion. The financing amount statistics are limited to financing rounds in 2021 only, excluding rounds before 2020 or after 2022. Projects marked in red in the table indicate that their current market value is already lower than the total financing amount in 2021.

The most devastating disasters occurred in the centralized finance platform sector. FTX, once seen as Binance's biggest competitor and having raised $1.32 billion, collapsed spectacularly in November 2022, with founder SBF sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. Almost simultaneously, Celsius Network also crashed. This crypto lending platform, which raised $750 million, promised users an 18% annualized deposit yield. Its token CEL plummeted from $8 to $0.02, evaporating 99.73% of its value. BlockFi, Voyager Digital, Babel Finance, and Prime Trust—names that once represented the "regularization" and "institutionalization" of crypto finance—raised over $500 million in total, but fell like dominoes during the liquidity crisis of 2022.

If the collapse of centralized platforms was due to fraudulent business models, then the collective death of NFT and metaverse projects was more like the dissipation of a nationwide illusion.

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

The Sandbox, a representative project of the metaverse concept, raised $93 million, and its virtual land NFTs were snapped up in 2021, with the SAND token soaring to $8.4. But three years later, this so-called metaverse is empty, with only a handful of participants in the occasional events. Although the official Twitter is still being updated, the comment section is already deserted. Even more 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 the cycle, and those that truly create lasting value account for less than 5%. This 5% is usually only identifiable at the lowest point of the bear market. The wheels of history keep turning, 2025 is about to end, and a new cycle is about to begin. When the new tide recedes, how many of today's projects will still be wearing their swim trunks?