Loopring Shuts DEX, Cites Low Adoption and Competition
Loopring closed its decentralized exchange, automated market maker and relayer, citing low adoption, weak business development and competition from newer zkEVM rollups.
Loopring has closed its decentralized exchange, automated market maker and relayer effective immediately, the team announced on X on Sunday.
The post cited three main reasons for the shutdown: the protocol failed to gain meaningful adoption, the team lacked business development skills and newer zkEVM-compatible rollups offered broader technical capabilities.
The announcement noted the protocol’s early design as a zero-knowledge rollup without a virtual machine limited composability and real-world payment use cases. “To be honest, Loopring never gained meaningful adoption,” the team wrote.
The developers described themselves as engineers who excel at coding but did not develop the business functions needed to grow a trading ecosystem. They added that external pressures, including major exchange delistings of the LRC token in 2026, accelerated the decision to end trading services.
Loopring launched after a 2017 initial coin offering that raised $45 million and helped demonstrate that zero-knowledge rollups could lower on-chain costs. Competing projects such as zkSync, Scroll and StarkNet provide full Ethereum smart contract compatibility, which affects Loopring’s specialized architecture.
The project shut its wallet service in July 2025, citing scaling challenges. For the DEX closure, the team said it will calculate and publish final user balances, distribute funds in batches to users’ Ethereum wallets and cover the gas fees for those transfers. No timetable for completion was provided.
On-chain data show Loopring’s total value locked is about $8 million, down from a $760 million peak in November 2021. The native token LRC trades near $0.01 versus a $3.75 all-time high in late 2021.
One of the protocol’s notable partnerships came in 2021, when Loopring worked with GameStop to support that retailer’s NFT platform, which launched in 2022.
The closure adds to a wider pattern of project wind-downs in 2026. Data from RootData show more than 60 crypto projects and protocols have shuttered services this year.
The Loopring team framed the shutdown as a deliberate wind-down rather than an ongoing, underused service, and said it will publish final balance calculations so users can verify distributions on-chain.
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