Loopring logs off: Ethereum's OG zk-rollup pulls the plug on its DEX after failing to roll with the times 🪦

Loopring, the Ethereum network's first zero-knowledge rollup, announced Sunday it is shutting down its decentralized exchange and automated market maker, ending all trading services and halting the relayer effective immediately. The team said in a post on X that three factors drove the decision: a failure to attain meaningful adoption, a lack of business development expertise, and being technologically surpassed by modern zkEVM rollups. "To be honest, Loopring never gained meaningful adoption," the team wrote. "As the first zk-rollup, we lacked a virtual machine – no composability, no real-world payment use cases. That limitation kept our ecosystem from growing."

The project launched after raising $45 million in a 2017 initial coin offering and helped prove that scaling Ethereum via zk-rollups was viable. Its successors, including zkSync, Scroll and StarkNet, are now fully compatible with Ethereum smart contracts. The Loopring team said external pressures, including major exchange delistings of LRC in 2026, "only accelerated the inevitable," and that running "a hollow service" was no longer an option. The protocol had already shut down its wallet services in July 2025, citing scaling challenges.

Loopring's total value locked sits at about $8 million, down nearly 99% from its $760 million peak in November 2021, according to L2Beat. Its native token, LRC, has fallen by a comparable margin to roughly $0.01 from an all-time high of $3.75 set the same month. One of the project's biggest milestones was a 2021 partnership with GameStop to power an NFT marketplace, launched the following year.

With the DEX closure, the team said it will calculate and publish all final user balances and distribute funds directly to users' Ethereum wallets in batches, covering gas fees. Loopring becomes the latest in a wave of crypto project shutdowns in 2026, with more than 60 protocols and services having shuttered operations this year according to RootData. Other notable closures include a16z-backed self-custody solution Entropy, app-chain infrastructure protocol Syndicate Labs and AI blockchain platform Yupp.