Từ 2 triệu người dùng hoạt động hàng tháng về con số 0: Zapper chết vì sự "trưởng thành" của DeFi

Original author: Eric, Foresight News

On July 8, 2026, Zapper co-founder Seb Audet posted a brief announcement on X: the platform will be fully shut down on August 3, with its website, mobile app, and API services all going offline.

Last November, the news of DappRadar's shutdown left many veteran crypto enthusiasts lamenting. Now, a once-star project that boasted 2 million monthly active users, processed over $13 billion in cumulative transactions, and secured $16.5 million in total funding, has also reached a dead end.

In 2019, Zapper's predecessor, DeFiZap, won the DeFi hackathon hosted by Kyber. At that time, DeFi was still in its infancy, with the entire sector's TVL sitting at just around $667 million. In May 2020, DeFiZap merged with DeFiSnap, and Zapper was officially born. As Seb put it, he was exploring DeFi at the time, and Zapper's creation initially stemmed from a personal desire to build a simple portfolio tracker, never imagining it would grow to such a scale.

In June 2020, Compound launched the COMP token, kicking off the 'DeFi Summer' that reshaped the industry landscape. Within three months, DeFi's TVL skyrocketed from about $700 million to over $13 billion, as retail investors flooded into yield farming. In an era where funds were scattered across various protocols, the need for a unified dashboard to track positions emerged naturally. Zapper, which allowed users to connect their wallets and monitor cross-protocol holdings, LP positions, and yields in real-time, logically spread within the crypto community.

The DeFi boom propelled Zapper's rapid growth. In early 2020, it completed a $1.5 million seed round, with Framework Ventures, ParaFi Capital, and other investors participating. In May 2021, at the peak of market frenzy, Zapper closed a $15 million Series A round led again by Framework Ventures, with participation from notable investors like Mark Cuban, Ashton Kutcher's Sound Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures.

At its peak, Zapper supported 14 chains, over 450 DeFi protocols, and more than 7,000 tokens, reaching over 2 million monthly active users and processing cumulative transaction volumes exceeding $13 billion. Its 'Zap' feature allowed users to execute complex, multi-step DeFi operations in a single transaction, once serving as the product's core differentiating selling point.

But the problem was that traffic did not translate into sustainable revenue. Zapper's revenue model mainly relied on collecting minor fees from DEX aggregation transactions, yet the competition in the aggregator sector was incredibly fierce, constantly squeezing fee margins. Meanwhile, maintaining a data indexing and real-time update system covering multiple chains and hundreds of protocols required sustained investment in substantial engineering resources and infrastructure costs.

On the other hand, while DeFi continues to develop, the trend is not toward diversification, but rather the concentration of capital and traffic towards top-tier protocols. After a brief downturn in 2022, DeFi has made significant strides in recent years, but due to a lack of attractive yields and airdrop expectations, user numbers have not increased. Zapper's functionality leaned more towards being B2C, fewer people were using it, DeFi no longer required complex operations, and the competition among DEX aggregators was too fierce. At that point, the demand underlying Zapper's strongest moat had clearly weakened.

Zapper was not unaware of the ceiling for a pure tool product. It attempted several rounds of transformation, but none succeeded. In September 2021, Zapper launched a points system based on on-chain interaction behavior. Users accumulated points through actions like check-ins, cross-chain activities, and trades, which could be redeemed for NFTs. Over 100,000 addresses participated in minting. According to OpenSea data, the NFT series had a cumulative trading volume exceeding 1,200 ETH, worth approximately $5 million at the time. However, as time passed, the price of this NFT series eventually dropped to zero, and the points system was not continued.

In October 2023, Zapper launched the on-chain social application Chainchat, which required users to purchase channel 'shares' to join group chats. A subsequent V2 version repositioned the product as a 'Web3 exploration tool,' attempting to expand its scope from DeFi to NFTs, DAOs, and on-chain accounts. In June 2024, Zapper announced the Zapper Protocol, planning to issue the ZAP token, aiming to build an open protocol to incentivize users to interpret and explain on-chain information.

However, none of these attempts ultimately turned the tide. The ZAP token was never officially issued, the protocol plans were shelved as the market turned bearish, and Chainchat quietly faded from user view.

Many tool-based products born in 2019 and 2020 have met their end in the past couple of years. These products 'died in different ways.' DappRadar is a typical example abandoned by the times. When all resources are converging towards top-tier protocols, without an environment of diverse flourishing projects, it doesn't matter how comprehensive your listed projects are.

While Zapper was also affected by shifts in its sector, its demise was more attributable to strategic missteps in its own transformations.

A portfolio tracker is not a product with a high entry barrier, but the underlying data costs are a hard expense. Without the ability to directly charge for this service, there must be a closely related, revenue-generating product. The DEX aggregator and the 'Zap' feature enabling one-click multi-step operations were naturally choices rooted in solid demand, but Zapper seemed not to prioritize the revenue-generating product, instead focusing more resources on the cost department.

Using the portfolio tracking function to drive traffic to revenue-generating features made sense in the early days. But as user funds gradually concentrated on a few protocols, and competition from rivals like DeBank increased, Zapper failed to adapt its strategy in time. From its subsequent attempts, it is evident that Zapper never broke free from a B2C mindset, constantly going in circles within the 'dead end' of using blockchain thinking to build consumer-facing products.

These B2C products sounded grand in narrative, but none targeted existing pain points; instead, they tried to create demand out of thin air. The fact that it persisted in the wrong direction for years also indirectly highlights just how massive the DeFi boom was back then. From Seb's farewell letter, where he wrote about 'evaluating multiple options, fully attempting some, and ultimately realizing that an orderly shutdown is the best choice,' it's clear that even the once-proud portfolio tracker found no takers in the current market. Even if it had pivoted that part towards a direction like Nansen or Arkham, it might have at least ended in a neutral outcome like an acquisition.

Speaking of DeBank, it has also scaled back in asset tracking, cutting support for some low-activity chains. But DeBank has a flagship product like Rabby Wallet, along with twice the funding of Zapper, giving it more resources and more stable revenue. If you browse reviews of Rabby Wallet on X, you'll find that many in the EVM-compatible chain space believe Rabby Wallet's experience and functionality surpass MetaMask.

In my view, Zapper's exit wasn't entirely due to 'recklessness,' but more so an excessive belief in blockchain maximalism. In the game of business, being overly immersed in one's own world while ignoring changes in the market's objective environment is fatal. Zapper serves as a wake-up call for tool-based products still surviving in the market: DappRadar was limited by its sector and couldn't diversify revenue streams, but if there's a chance to transform, don't cling to past glories.