Loopring Shuts Down Decentralised Exchange, Halts Trading Operations

Loopring, the first zero-knowledge rollup solution from Ethereum, has shut down its decentralised exchange and AMM. Furthermore, the firm has put a halt to all trading operations and stopped the relayer instantly, as per the announcement posted on X. The Loopring team gave three main reasons for shutting down: a failure to achieve any kind of adoption, poor business development skills, and getting technologically outdated by current zkEVM solutions. Loopring was technically ahead of its time, having raised $45 million (roughly Rs. 425.16 crore) through an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017 and being able to demonstrate that Ethereum scaling using zk rollups was indeed possible.

Project to Return User Funds Following Trading Suspension

Technology develops rapidly in the crypto space, and the protocol was eventually outpaced by the better alternatives like zkSync, Scroll, and StarkNet that it inspired. According to the team, they are  “engineers at heart” rather than businesspeople, being great coders who have never had the “passion or skills for business development.” The project had ceased all its wallet operations back in July 2025 due to scalability issues.

The increased pressure from more advanced rivals, who have the full capability to work with Ethereum smart contracts, the wallet said that “while our specialised architecture now seems obsolete,” further cemented the decision to gradually retire it instead of running a hollow service. The plan is to compute and release all the final balances of users, after which the funds will be distributed to users' Ethereum addresses in batches, including paying for the gas fees. 

The shutdown of Loopring is another addition to the increasing number of crypto closures this year, as the bear market worsens and narratives from the previous cycle no longer hold any relevance. Over 60 crypto projects and protocols have closed shop in the year 2026 so far, as per the data by RootData. Among some of the most notable are Entropy (self-custody solution) supported by a16z, app-chain infrastructure protocol Syndicate, and AI blockchain platform Yupp.

There have been plenty of DeFi protocols that have thrown in the towel, for example, DeFi mobile “superapp” Legend, which announced its shutdown after two years of operation. Legend was a DeFi aggregator that mainly aimed to bring DeFi to its users. The TVL for the broader DeFi ecosystem has fallen close to 50 percent since October. The other protocol was Carrot, a Solana-based decentralised finance yield protocol, which was shut down not because of any operational problems, but due to the Drift Protocol exploit in early April.