Five crypto firms including Fantasy.top, ZERO Network close

Five crypto firms announced closures this week as a prolonged downturn in the crypto market reduced user activity, investor funding and revenue. The companies named include Fantasy.top, Everclear, ZERO Network, Syndicate Labs and Bitcoin Depot, which filed for bankruptcy on Monday.

Fantasy.top posted on X that it will shut down in June after two years of operations, citing insufficient trading volume to sustain long-term operations. The trading card platform tested different products, including prediction markets, but the team said none reached a durable market fit. Fantasy.top co-founder Kipit wrote that the company “tried to put crypto on top of a model that was never built for crypto” and that it drew users “who want to make money from cards” rather than people who enjoy trading card games.

Everclear said it is winding down the Everclear Foundation and Everclear Labs because the protocol “never developed the commercial depth we needed” and could not generate meaningful revenue. The group explored acquisition options and shifted to partnership-based plans, but wrote that it “underestimated how long it would take those partners to go live — and our runway ran out before they did.” Everclear said it is considering open-sourcing the protocol. The token tied to the protocol fell sharply after the shutdown announcement.

The ZERO Network team posted that it will close the network to concentrate on its sister products, the Zerion crypto wallet and a data service. Zerion co-founder and CEO Evgeny Yurtaev wrote that the team launched ZERO believing “users shouldn’t pay to transact on-chain” and added, “We were obsessed with moving on-chain mainstream. We still are. But the world didn’t need more blockchains – it needs a better way to access them.”

Syndicate Labs announced it would wind down after five years, pointing to a shrinking market for rollups. Bitcoin Depot filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. and cited financial strain and regulatory pressure in its filing.

Other recent exits include the crypto mobile superapp Legend, which announced its closure on May 13, and earlier failures such as Solana aggregator Step Finance, derivatives protocol Polynomial, lending protocol Seamless and Balancer Labs. Those teams cited reasons including hacks and lack of product-market fit.

Market conditions have weighed on the industry. Bitcoin has fallen roughly 40% from a peak in early October. Many public crypto companies reported first-quarter losses, and the sector has cut more than 5,000 jobs this year as funding and revenue tightened.

NYDIG research lead Greg Cipolaro noted that the pool of projects able to attract investor interest has narrowed, with most attention focused on applications that extend traditional finance products onto blockchain infrastructure.

Some services continue to see demand. Perpetual futures platform Hyperliquid reported sustained interest that lifted its token price above $62, and blockchain-based prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket recorded a combined record monthly trading volume of $23.8 billion in April.

Company statements and co-founder posts listed the main reasons for the shutdowns: insufficient trading volume, failure to find product-market fit, inability to generate steady revenue and a lack of time or capital to wait for partners and integrations to launch. Several teams said they may open-source code or shift resources to other products. Some related tokens dropped sharply in secondary markets following the announcements.