Two crypto projects disappeared from the active development map within 24 hours, as Linera and Switchboard announced that they were shutting down operations.
The closures come as the crypto bear market continues to pressure projects that once looked built to last. RootData is already tracking more than 260 crypto projects that have been buried in 2026, although its list includes bankruptcies, announced closures and projects that have simply gone dormant.
Linera, an a16z-backed layer-1 network, announced on September 18 that it was ending operations immediately and for the foreseeable future. The decision came after an attempt to raise enough money to keep the project moving toward mainnet failed.
The team had used Sonar to seek funding, but the sale attracted nearly $900,000 in commitments, falling short of its $1.5 million USDC minimum. Every contribution was subsequently refunded.
That left Linera looking for emergency financing to bridge the gap to mainnet. Those efforts also came up short.
The project had raised $12 million through two seed rounds. Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, a16z crypto, led the first round in 2022, while Borderless Capital led the second in 2023.
For users who had accumulated points, the shutdown comes with another layer of uncertainty. Linera said those balances would remain preserved in its records, but warned that it could not guarantee the points would “receive any consideration in the future.”
The company is also switching off its application and closing its Discord server, effectively pulling down much of the infrastructure around the project while leaving open the possibility that the underlying protocol could eventually return.
“The decision does not reflect on the technology, the team, or this community…We know this is not the news you hoped for, and it is not the news we hoped to deliver. We still hope to finish the protocol and launch applications on it in the future,” the team wrote in its announcement.
The Crypto Bear Market Is Changing What Gets Built
A day later, Switchboard Technology Labs announced its own wind-down.
The company told developers to migrate to other oracle providers, including Pyth and RedStone. Its remaining support is scheduled to end on September 25, 2026.
Switchboard tied the decision to a combination of recent exploits, exhausted alternatives and weaker conditions around the business itself. According to the company, artificial intelligence has lowered the cost of building oracle infrastructure, while the bear market has reduced the number of new blockchain launches and squeezed project budgets.
That creates an uncomfortable contradiction for crypto infrastructure companies: the technology can become easier and cheaper to build at the same time that there are fewer customers able or willing to pay for it.
“In many ways, crypto has won, there’s less of a need for data intermediaries,” Switchboard said.
Its explanation points to a broader change in the economics of crypto infrastructure. As tooling becomes more accessible and blockchain activity slows, projects competing to supply foundational services can find themselves caught between falling costs and shrinking demand.
The crypto bear market therefore looks less like a single financial event and more like a filtering mechanism for the companies built around the industry. Linera ran out of financing before reaching mainnet. Switchboard said the combination of exploits, AI-driven cost reductions and weaker demand had exhausted its remaining options.
The two shutdowns are different, but their timing is striking. Both arrived in consecutive days, adding to a year in which RootData has already recorded more than 260 projects ending through bankruptcy, closure or prolonged inactivity.
That figure comes with an important caveat: RootData groups several kinds of endings together, so the total does not represent 260 identical failures.
Still, the pattern is difficult to ignore. The crypto bear market is thinning the field while security incidents and changing technology economics add another layer of pressure.
For developers, investors and users, the result is a crypto industry with fewer projects competing for funding, attention and demand—and a growing reminder that even heavily funded infrastructure can disappear before it reaches the stage where its technology gets a chance to prove itself.