Ethereum’s first zero-knowledge rollup, Loopring, announced the closure of its decentralized exchange and automated market maker on Sunday, halting all trading services and the relayer with immediate effect.
In a post on X on Sunday, the team cited There are three main reasons for the closure: the inability to achieve meaningful adoption, a lack of business development skills, and being technologically outpaced by modern zkEVM solutions.
“Frankly, Loopring never achieved meaningful adoption,” the team said. “With the first zk rollup, we lacked a virtual machine – no composability, no real-world payment use cases. That limitation prevented our ecosystem from growing.”
Loopring was a technical pioneer of its time. He raised $45 million in an initial coin offering in 2017 and helped prove that scaling Ethereum via zk rollups was feasible. But the technology evolved quickly in the crypto industry and was eventually surpassed by the more capable successors it inspired, such as zkSync, Scroll, and StarkNet.
The team said they are “engineers at heart,” not entrepreneurs, who excel at writing code but never develop the “passion or skills for business development.”
“External pressures – including the major delisting of LRC in 2026 – have only accelerated the inevitable,” they said.
The team added that pressure from more advanced competitors, which are fully compatible with Ethereum smart contracts, “while our specialized architecture now feels outdated,” exacerbated the decision to gracefully end it, “rather than run a hollow service.”
Loopring had already shut down its wallet services in July 2025 due to scale issues.
Related: Syndicate Labs is shutting down after five years, citing the shrinking rollup market
With the closure of DEX, the team said it will calculate and publish all end-user balances, and then distribute the funds in batches directly to users’ Ethereum wallets and cover gas fees.
Loopring’s total value is approximately $8 million, down almost 99% from its peak of $760 million in November 2021. according to to L2Beat. The native token, LRC, has fallen a similar amount to $0.01 from its all-time high of $3.75 in the same month.
Loopring’s overall value has collapsed over the past five years. Source: L2Beat
One of Loopring’s biggest milestones was a 2021 partnership with GameStop to power its NFT platform, which launched the following year.
Crypto winter is biting deep this year
Loopring’s demise adds to the growing list of crypto closures this year, as the bear market deepens and the stories from the previous cycle no longer apply.
More than 60 crypto projects and protocols have already shut down services by 2026. according to to RootData. Some of the most notable include 16z-backed decentralized self-management solution Entropy, app-chain infrastructure protocol Syndicate, and AI blockchain platform Yupp.
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