I've never seen this before. ZKX, a project that just raised $7.6 million a month ago, announced its shutdown agreement!
ZKX is a well-known project and the leader of Starknet. It has very impressive investors, including HashKey, Amber and StarkWare!
Moreover, ZKX was only launched a month ago and has been listed on two exchanges, Gate.io and KuCoin.
According to a tweet from founder Eduard on X, "User participation on the platform is very poor, with only a few people mining. As a result, trading volume has dropped significantly, and daily revenue cannot cover cloud server expenses. This makes it impossible for the team to pay salaries and other business expenses. The money the team pays to market makers has exceeded the project revenue." To sum up, in one sentence, the team is unable to make ends meet and has no choice but to close down!
As expected, memes are still the best. If there is no expenditure, there will be no bankruptcy.
Alas, as a leading project on Starknet, ZKX is in such a mess. Starknet probably won’t last long.
Starknet is a project that has raised over 200 million dollars. Although Starknet has more than 100 applications, there are only four projects in the ecosystem with a TVL of more than 10 million dollars. The fifth-ranked lending protocol Vesu has a TVL of only 4 million dollars!
According to L2beat data, Starknet's total locked value is only 682 million US dollars, ranking ninth, and other zk layer2 projects are not very good either.
This year, the second-layer network projects of zk rollup in the Ethereum ecosystem have issued a large number of coins. Judging from the projects that have already issued coins, they are all going to be in a state of collective decline.
From the TVL data, the top five L2s are all OP, and ZK is all behind. Although it is said that OP is in the short term and ZK is in the long term, but the data of ZK in the past few years is too ugly, right?
Not only are the data ugly, but the popularity of the project has also been criticized, which makes it difficult for Scroll and Linea to survive. . .
If the second-layer network ecology of Ethereum ZK Rollup is in such a state of collective decline, it is not impossible to drag down Ethereum in this cycle. Compared with Solana and TON, it is simply incomparable. . .
No wonder Vitalik worked so hard in Japan and gave lectures for four consecutive days.
However, he probably can’t do anything about these Ethereum project owners who are cutting leeks:
In the second half of the year, Starknet will launch versions v0.13.2 and v0.13.3. At the ETHCC conference, the CEO also stated that Starknet token staking will be launched in the fourth quarter of this year.
After this set of combined punches, if Starknet still fails, then it will probably be completely doomed. . Then the other second-layer networks will be waiting to make a fool of themselves one by one~