Author: Gu Yu, RootData
Recently, as projects like BitMEX and Bitmart have announced closures, dead projects have once again become a focus of market discussion. Currently, RootData's 2026 Crypto Dead Projects List has included over 100 projects.
The massive elimination of low-quality projects and extreme pessimism are often seen as signs of a bear market bottom. At this point in time, where exactly are we in the cycle of the crypto industry's history? What about indicators such as the number of new projects, new tokens, and funding data?
Based on these questions, RootData has sorted through multi-dimensional exclusive data on the platform and created 5 charts to help everyone better understand the current state of the crypto industry's development and its position in the overall historical cycle.
1. Number of New Projects
The number of new projects is one of the most important indicators for judging the activity of the crypto market, reflecting the enthusiasm of entrepreneurs for the prospects and opportunities of the crypto market.
This chart is mainly based on the X account registration time statistics of over 20,000 projects collected by RootData, which can fairly accurately represent the time when new projects are established and enter the market, down to the month.
From this chart, the peak period for the number of newly established crypto projects was from September 2021 to January 2022, with over 300 new projects each month. During this time, the BTC price hit an all-time high of $69,000. Since then, the number of new projects has generally continued to decline, with slight rebounds in March 2023, March 2024, and January 2025.
After that, the number of new projects plummeted. Since the beginning of this year, the monthly number of new projects has not exceeded 80, approaching the level before August 2020. Interestingly, the BTC price at this time is on par with the price at the end of 2021 when the number of new projects peaked.
2. Project Funding Data
In recent years, crypto primary market financing has shown clear characteristics of a peak decline and structural adjustment.
From 2021 to early 2022, the market was extremely active, with quarterly financing amounts repeatedly exceeding $10 billion, peaking at nearly $13 billion. The number of financing events also climbed to a historical high of 592, with both the scale and frequency of capital inflows reaching cyclical highs.
As mainstream cryptocurrency prices fell and the market turned bearish, investment and financing amounts dropped to their lowest in nearly five years in 2023 and remained low. However, the number of financing events quickly rose in March 2024, attempting to capture potential opportunities through a "spread net" diversification strategy with limited funds. But this strategy ultimately failed to avoid poor investment returns.
In the past year, the trends in the number of financing events and the amount of financing have gradually diverged. Although the number of financing events has continued to decline in recent years, the financing amount has significantly increased since the end of 2024, mainly due to large-scale financing from leading projects such as Binance, Polymarket, and Dunamu.
Currently, the number of financings in the crypto market has declined for three consecutive years, marking the longest downturn in the industry's history. Even the new high of BTC prices in 2025 failed to reverse this trend, reflecting that capital has shifted to a highly prudent allocation logic, accelerating concentration in top-tier tracks and projects with strong certainty and high barriers, rather than broadly betting on emerging projects. The Matthew effect in the market is intensifying.
III. Number of Mergers and Acquisitions
Unlike the significant contraction in the crypto investment and financing market, the number of mergers and acquisitions in the crypto industry remains at a historical high, undergoing a structural shift from sporadic attempts to full-scale explosion.
Between 2013 and 2020, the number of M&A transactions in the crypto industry remained in single digits for a long time. It broke 10 for the first time in 2021, reached 11 in 2022, and then accelerated. 2025 became a landmark watershed: a total of 267 M&A deals were completed throughout the year, a year-on-year increase of over 50%.
Entering 2026, despite the bearish spot prices in the crypto market, M&A activity has instead heated up against the trend. In the first half of the year, 75 transactions occurred, with a total value exceeding $90 billion, a 26-fold surge compared to the same period last year.
Typical cases include Mastercard's $1.8 billion acquisition of payment infrastructure BVNK, and Blockworks' acquisition of data platform Messari at a price far below its previous valuation (over 90% discount), clearly indicating that bargain hunting and infrastructure positioning have become mainstream strategies.
At the same time, crypto giants such as Coinbase, Kraken, and Moonpay hope to enhance their control over the upstream and downstream industry chain through M&A, filling gaps in core capabilities; traditional internet and financial companies are accelerating their entry, acquiring core capabilities through M&A to gain a dominant position in the increasingly large crypto market.
Overall, crypto M&A is evolving from a cyclical activity into an institutionalized wave of consolidation. As the global regulatory framework gradually becomes clearer, the future crypto industry may be dominated by a few giants holding licenses and infrastructure, and the consolidation process will continue to deepen.
IV. Number of New Tokens
The number of new tokens is one of the most important indicators reflecting the activity of the crypto secondary market. Most project parties tend to issue tokens when the market is recovering and the situation is improving, and it is closely related to the popularity of new narratives.
Looking at the entire historical cycle, the number of new tokens experienced two small peaks in 2018 and 2021, but the true historical peak began in March 2024 and set a record in January 2025, reaching 145 new tokens, which is far from the peaks of other charts.
This is mainly related to the Meme craze and AI agent narrative since 2024. In January 2024, pump.fun launched on the Solana mainnet, significantly lowering the technical threshold for ordinary users to issue tokens. Around March 2024, the meme craze officially broke out, with coins like BONK, WIF, and BOME achieving hundred-fold gains, and the market formed a narrative of "attention is value": anything that can attract attention can be tokenized.
By the end of 2024, projects like Truth Terminal and ai16z drove the AI agent narrative to popularity. Virtuals Protocol allowed users to quickly create, tokenize, and trade AI agents, with over 10,000 AI agent projects created in recent years.
The foundation is the technological democratization of token launch platforms, the fuel is meme culture, and the AI agent craze is a powerful booster in the later stage. These factors together led to a new high in the number of new tokens in the crypto market in January 2025.
However, in this cycle, a large number of tokens have extremely short lifecycles, most of them go to zero in a short time, and lead to severe dilution of market liquidity, delaying or fragmenting the traditional "altcoin season."
5. Number of Primary Market Investors
According to RootData data, nearly 7,000 projects, VCs, or individuals have participated in primary market financing rounds, with 2,617 VCs and nearly 3,000 individuals.
Although closely related to the crypto primary market situation, unlike the trends in financing amount and number, this chart did not decline sharply since 2021. Instead, it peaked in April 2024, with the cumulative number of participating investors exceeding 900, setting a historical record.
This is mainly due to changes in the composition of investor themes. In 21-22, the main participants in the crypto financing market were VCs. Many second- and third-tier VCs heavily invested in altcoin project financing, averaging over 20 investments per month. Similarly, many projects' financing rounds often listed 20-40 VC names to show their popularity.
However, during the bear market of 22-23, many VCs were eliminated by the market, and angel investors, mainly entrepreneurs and KOLs, became one of the most active entities in the primary market. Many projects' financing PRs began to list dozens of angel investor names, with the highest record exceeding 100.
But as the number of financings continues to decline and investor returns are too poor, angel investors are now fading from the investor lists of most projects. This month, the list of investors with investment records is only about 100, a new low since July 2020.
6. Number of New Ecosystem Projects
New ecosystem projects on various Layer1/2 have long been the main source of new projects in the crypto industry. Many Layer1/2s hold various hackathons, incubation programs, etc., to boost their ecosystem activity.
For a long time, Ethereum and its Layer2s have dominated the number of new projects, taking the top four spots in 2022. However, since 2024, Solana has become the primary destination for new projects amid its DeFi and meme wave. Meanwhile, Hyperliquid, Arc, and Robinhood Chain have become the few new Layer1/2s to appear on the list in recent years, further squeezing Ethereum's market space.
In the first seven months of this year, the number of new ecosystem projects on various Layer1/2s recorded by RootData has almost all declined sharply. Currently, the top 8 Layer1/2s are Solana (59), Robinhood Chain (42), Ethereum (36), Base (30), Hyperliquid (19), BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Polygon, Arc, and Sui.
