Blur NFT marketplace to shut down

Blur, the NFT marketplace that overtook OpenSea in trading volume shortly after its 2022 launch, announced it will shut down its website in a month. They also announced that Blend, Blur's NFT lending platform, will stop matching new loans on the same day. Borrowers have until then to repay their loans or let them default.

The announcement comes days after the Blur team said it would also shut down Blast, its Ethereum layer-2 blockchain, because it cost more to run than it earned.

Pudgy Penguins company shuts down its Abstract blockchain after losing "8 figures" running it

An illustration of a smiling penguin wearing a pink scarf with a blue dead fish on its head.Pudgy Penguin #6827 (attribution)
Igloo, the company behind the Pudgy Penguins NFTs, announced it will shut down Abstract, its Ethereum layer-2 blockchain, on December 15. CEO Luca Netz said the company had lost "8 figures" in the less than two years they were running the chain.

Users have until December 15 to move their assets, after which anything left on the chain will become inaccessible. DefiLllama estimates there were around $76 million in assets on the chain when the shutdown was announced, leading some users to complain that the wind-down period is too short.

The shutdown comes a few months after Igloo shut down its Pudgy Party mobile game, which had dropped to around 200–300 active users shortly after its launch, and also lost the company millions of dollars.

Blur shuts down its Blast blockchain

Blast, the Ethereum layer-2 created by the team behind the Blur NFT marketplace, is shutting down less than three years after launch. In the announcement, they disclosed that its costs now exceed its revenue and that it sees "no credible path" to fixing that. Despite once boasting of more than $2 billion in total value locked in June 2024, generating revenue from network usage of around $3.5 million, that revenue has collapsed to less than $2,000 last month.

Porsche shuts down its NFT project with the floor price down 96%

When Porsche announced its Porsche 911 NFT project at Art Basel Miami in 2022, it promised holders "he opportunity to co-create Porsche's future in the Web3 universe". Turns out there wasn't much to that future.

After bungling the mint, selling fewer than 2,000 of the planned 7,500 NFTs after buyers balked at the 0.911 ETH (then $1,490) pricetag, the price went nearly exclusively downhill. Now, with the NFTs floundering with floor prices down 96% from launch, Porsche has announced it is ending its "shared adventure".

Abracadabra proposes winding down after string of hacks years ago left each $1 "stablecoin" token backed by $0.04 in reserves

Abracadabra, the defi project behind the Magic Internet Money (MIM) stablecoin, is shutting down. It blamed its string of hacks: $6.5 million theft in January 2024, $13 million in March 2025, and $1.8 million in October 2025, which altogether left about $21 million in bad debt. According to the shutdown proposal, 22 million MIM are in circulation, backed by just $900,000 in "actionable backing" which puts the supposedly dollar-pegged token at about $0.04. Two wallets voted on the proposal.

In June, a similarly low-participation vote handed "stewardship" of the project to a different group which promised to "revitalize" Abracadabra. Days later, treasury wallets sold around $500,000 worth of MIM. In July, the project tweeted that a roadmap to restore the peg was "coming this week," then never posted again. A week after that tweet, Abracadabra-controlled wallets moved about $8.3 million in treasury assets with no explanation, some of it to a Binance deposit address, in what one commentator called "treasury looting". The wind-down proposal doesn't mention the $8.3 million or count it toward what MIM holders could redeem.

Step App "move-to-earn" project shuts down

Step App, one of the last surviving "move-to-earn" projects from the 2022 crypto fitness fad, announced it will shut down all services on August 21. The project advertised itself as a "fitness app that pays you", and was essentially a step counter that paid crypto rewards. Users had to first buy the Step App's FITFI token to purchase an NFT representing sneakers, then were rewarded with the project's KCAL tokens for each minute they spent moving — although the number of minutes that would generate rewards were capped, often at just a few minutes, and required more NFTs to increase.

Holders of the project's FITFI and KCAL tokens have two weeks to cash out, although they're not likely to recoup much. FITFI trades at fractions of a cent, and KCAL trades at $0.01 — far below its $1–$4 prices from the project's peak in 2022 and 2023. Holders of Step NFTs are likely similarly out of luck.

Proof of Attendance Protocol (POAP) shuts down

Proof of Attendance Protocol, or POAP, was a darling of the web3 hype cycle and supposed proof of the utility of NFTs. "Using blockchain technology, POAP tokenizes your memories, so they can last forever and be truly yours," the website gushes, presenting a solution to a problem I previously did not realize I had.

The tokens were typically issued as souvenirs from crypto conferences or other events, and were supposed to function as cryptographically verifiable proof that the owner attended an event. The fact that the POAPs were tradable of course undermined this somewhat, but nevertheless the crypto world had come up a number of reasons why POAPs would be the future of event planning and digital identity and all kinds of things.

Now, the project's co-founder has announced that "Unfortunately, crypto's funding cycles and distribution dynamics made it hard to build a sustainable company without cannibalizing the ethos that made POAP mean something. Building on a fragile and quickly evolving stack, in the middle of an incredible hype cycle, only added to the challenges."

MVMT Labs files for bankruptcy

MVMT Labs, the company behind the Movement blockchain, has filed for bankruptcy, reporting assets of between $100,001 and $500,000 against liabilities of between $1 million and $10 million. The largest unsecured claim, at more than $1.6 million, belongs to co-founder Rushi Manche — whom the company fired in May 2025 after an investigation into the MOVE token launch.

Movement was an Ethereum layer-2 built on Move, the language originally developed for Facebook's dead Libra stablecoin project. It raised tens of millions, including a $38 million Series A led by Polychain in April 2024, before its December 2024 token launch went sideways. The firm opted to give an obscure market maker called Rentech control of 66 million $MOVE, or around 5% of supply, which they promptly dumped, crashing the price.

The Movement blockchain will reportedly continue on under a new company called Move Industries, and pivot away from Ethereum scaling and towards stablecoin operations.

Summer Finance exploited for $6 million, shuts down

Summer Finance, a defi platform that provides "institutional defi vault infrastructure", was exploited for $6 million in an apparent flash loan attack. The attacker used a flash loan to deposit $64.8 million and then withdraw $70.9 million, taking advantage of a price manipulation bug that allowed them to withdraw more than they deposited.

Shortly after the exploit, Summer Finance announced it had "no viable path forward other than to wind down operations". They added, "a meaningful portion of the team's own capital was held in the affected vaults, removing the runway we needed to rebuild."

Dutch Knaken crypto platform collapses with $8 million in customer funds missing

The Dutch cryptocurrency platform Knaken (not to be confused with the American Kraken platform) abruptly went offline in early June, leaving roughly 30,000 customers unable to access their funds. The company was unable to secure a license under the EU's MiCA regulations, which it said forced them to shut down. Though they claimed to be winding down the company in an orderly fashion, they reportedly stopped paying customer withdrawals, and asked customers to stop filing claims.

Dutch prosecutors asked courts to declare the platform bankrupt and install a court-appointed trustee to oversee the process of extracting assets from the company to return to customers, who are missing around €7 million (~$8 million). The request was approved. The country's Fiscal Information and Investigation Service has also opened a criminal investigation into the platform.

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