Are Those High-Raised 2021 Projects Still Alive?

Do you 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, the concept of the Metaverse made everyone believe we were on the eve of an Internet revolution, and the cryptocurrency industry experienced an unprecedented funding frenzy. Venture capital firms rushed in, fearing they would miss out on the next hundred-bagger. In that era of fervor, it seemed like any project labeled "Web3" could easily raise tens of millions of dollars.

According to Venture Capital analysis, crypto tech startups raised $25.2 billion that year, a 713% surge from $3.1 billion in 2020. However, four years later, as we look back at the top 400 high-funded projects, only a very small number are still standing.

Most projects have disappeared, either announcing closure, pivoting to other projects, collapsing after being hacked, suffering a huge negative impact following FTX's downfall, or becoming zombie projects lying flat.

Note: This table includes 67 representative cases from the top 400 funded projects of 2021 that have since closed, gone to zero, or have low operational activity, with a total funding amount exceeding $5 billion. Funding amount statistics are limited to single-year funding in 2021, excluding funding rounds before 2020 or after 2022. Projects marked in red for market value in the table indicate that their current market value is lower than the total funding amount in 2021.

The most catastrophic disasters occurred in the centralized finance platform sector. FTX, once funded with $1.32 billion and seen as Binance's biggest competitor, collapsed in November 2022. Founder SBF was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. Almost simultaneously collapsing with FTX was Celsius Network, a $750 million funded crypto lending platform that promised users an 18% deposit APY. Its token, CEL, dropped from $8 to $0.02, evaporating by 99.73%. BlockFi, Voyager Digital, Babel Finance, Prime Trust, names that once represented the "mainstreaming" and "institutionalization" of crypto finance, with a combined funding of over $500 million, fell like dominoes in the liquidity crisis of 2022.

If the collapse of centralized platforms was due to fraudulent business models, then the collective demise of NFT and Metaverse projects feels more like a mass hallucination dissipating.

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, and its token AXS surged to $164.9 at one point. In-game pet NFTs were even flipped for hundreds of thousands of dollars. In developing countries like the Philippines, countless people quit their jobs to "play-to-earn" full-time, seeing Axie as an opportunity to change their destiny. However, when the game's economic model collapsed, AXS plummeted by 99.49% to $0.85, and those players who had invested their life savings realized in the end that it was nothing more than a Ponzi game that required a continuous influx of new players.

The Sandbox, a flagship project for the Metaverse concept, raised $93 million, and its virtual land NFTs were sold out in 2021, with the SAND token surging to $8.4. However, three years later, this so-called Metaverse is desolate, with few participants in occasional events, and although the official Twitter account is still active, the comment section is practically deserted. Even more ironically, most NFT platforms focused on music and art have become zombie projects.

Reflecting on the lessons of 2021 today reveals some harsh truths: the majority of projects are products of cycles, and projects that truly create sustainable value do not exceed 5%. This 5% is usually only recognized at the lowest point of a bear market. As the wheel of history rolls forward, with 2025 on the horizon, a new cycle is about to begin. When the new tide recedes, how many of today's projects will be left wearing swim trunks?