The DeFi lender ZeroLend has dropped shocking news that after three full years, the protocol is shutting down completely. They say low activity and drying-up liquidity on the chains has made it impossible to keep going.
“After three years of pouring everything into building and running DeFi lender ZeroLend, we’ve had to make the really tough call to wind things down,” founder Ryker shared in a post on X.
He didn’t sugarcoat it. “No matter how hard the team pushed, it’s obvious now that ZeroLend just isn’t sustainable the way it’s set up anymore.”
DeFi lender ZeroLend built its whole thing around Ethereum layer-2 networks, where those speedy sidechains Vitalik Buterin once hyped as the future for keeping Ethereum scalable and strong.
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But even Vitalik flipped the script recently, saying his old layer-2 vision “doesn’t really hold up anymore,” with too many failing to lock in proper security and the push shifting back toward mainnet upgrades and native rollups.
Ryker pointed out that many of the blockchains DeFi lender ZeroLend supported have gone quiet or lost almost all their liquidity. In some spots, oracle services, the critical data feeds that keep everything running smoothly, have pulled the plug entirely, making markets unreliable and revenue basically nonexistent.
On top of that, as DeFi lender ZeroLend started picking up steam, it drew the wrong kind of crowd like hackers and scammers looking for weak spots. Pair that with the razor-thin margins and sky-high risks baked into any lending setup, and the protocol spent long stretches bleeding money.
DeFi Lender ZeroLend team is now focused on getting users out safely right now
“We’re begging everyone to pull any funds they’ve still got sitting on the platform,” Ryker stressed. Some assets might be stuck on chains that have turned into ghost towns with terrible liquidity, so ZeroLend plans to roll out smart contract upgrades aimed at freeing up and redistributing whatever’s trapped.
They’re also still chasing down funds from a nasty exploit back in February last year. That hit a Bitcoin product on Base hard, with an attacker draining lending pools. Suppliers caught in that mess are set to get partial refunds, covered by an airdrop allocation the DeFi lender ZeroLend team received.
At its peak in November 2024, ZeroLend had nearly $359 million locked in a serious number. But now? It’s down to just $6.6 million, according to DefiLlama, showing how fast things unraveled.
The ZERO token took a brutal 34% hit in the last 24 hours as word spread about the shutdown, and it’s shed almost all its value since peaking around a tenth of a cent back in May 2024 (per CoinGecko data).
It’s a harsh reminder of how brutal the DeFi space can get when liquidity vanishes and risks pile up. For anyone still in DeFi lender ZeroLend, the message is clear: move your assets now while the exit doors are still open.
