How does a crypto project die? According to RootData, over 120 crypto projects have been added to the Dead Projects list since 2026. I dug up my old 'Airdrop Cemetery' and updated it with the '2026 Fallen Crypto Projects Directory.' https://airdrop-cemetery2.vercel.app/ Looking closely, some of these were once the hottest projects. Many of them, I personally burned Gas for, deposited funds into, or held their NFTs. There are even some apps and infrastructures that I still think are valuable and useful. If we have to pinpoint a common thread among these gradually fading projects, it’s probably not that they suddenly 'died' one day. More often, they first lose new users, then liquidity and developers. The community shifts from discussing the product to only asking about token prices, and the team goes from frequent updates to occasionally posting a 'still building' message. In the end, the website is still up, the tokens are still trading, but hardly anyone is actually using them. A project doesn’t truly start dying because its price dropped—it’s when the problem it aimed to solve is no longer relevant to anyone. Just because a product was once great doesn’t mean it can survive bull and bear markets, and it certainly doesn’t mean its token is worth holding long-term. In a bull market, funding, subsidies, and airdrops can quickly create users, TVL, and trading volume. But how much of that comes from real demand? That often only becomes clear when the market cools down. Many projects don’t fail because their products suddenly stop working, but because the cost of sustaining growth becomes too high: when subsidies stop, users leave; when token prices drop, the community goes silent; when funding dries up, grand roadmaps start facing endless delays. At this point, the project might still be running, and the tokens might still be trading, but the conditions for further growth have fundamentally changed. I think what we really need to observe isn’t just how much the price has dropped, but why users are staying, whether the protocol can generate revenue, whether the team is still delivering, and what role the token actually plays in the product. Acknowledging the value a project once created and admitting that it has lost its growth potential are two different things. Of course, we can reminisce about products that were genuinely useful, but there’s no need to keep holding onto them just to prove we weren’t wrong back then.