Are those projects that raised high financing in 2021 still alive?

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 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 frenzy, it seemed that any project with a "Web3" label could easily raise tens of millions of dollars.

According to Venture Capital analysis, crypto technology startups raised $25.2 billion that year, a 713% surge compared to $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.

The majority of projects have already disappeared; they either announced the cessation of operations, pivoted to other projects, were crippled after being hacked, suffered huge negative impacts after the collapse of FTX, or became zombie projects lying dormant.

Note: This table includes 67 representative cases from the top 500 projects by financing amount in 2021 that have already closed down, gone to zero, or have extremely low operational activity, with a total financing amount exceeding $5 billion. The financing amount statistics are limited to 2021 annual financing only, excluding rounds before 2020 or after 2022. Projects with market caps marked in red in the table indicate that their current market cap is already lower than the total financing amount in 2021.

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

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 raised $159.5 million with its "play-to-earn" concept, its token AXS once soared to $164.9, and in-game pet NFTs were even speculated up to hundreds of thousands of dollars each. In developing countries like the Philippines, countless people quit their jobs to "farm gold" 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 players who invested their life savings ultimately realized it was just a Ponzi game that needed a constant influx of new players.

The representative metaverse project The Sandbox raised $93 million, its virtual land NFTs were snapped up in 2021, and the SAND token soared to $8.4. But three years later, this so-called metaverse is empty, with only a handful of participants in occasional events. Although the official Twitter is still updating, 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 a bear market. As the wheels of history roll forward and 2025 is about to end, 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?