The leveraged output farming pioneer cites falling revenue, failed M&A talks, and past month’s Binance delisting arsenic reasons for shutting down aft a four-year run.
Updated May 27, 2025, 8:24 a.m. Published May 27, 2025, 8:22 a.m.
Alpaca Finance, erstwhile a cornerstone connected the BNB Chain and an aboriginal person successful leveraged output farming, volition unopen down operations by the extremity of 2025 owed to an unsustainable concern exemplary amid a much competitory and capital-intensive DeFi landscape.
The protocol said Monday that it volition statesman winding down each products, including its archetypal output farming platform, automated vaults, and decentralized perpetuals, implicit the adjacent fewer months.
Front-end entree volition stay disposable done December 31, 2025, to springiness users clip to retreat their assets.
“This prime wasn’t made lightly,” the Alpaca squad wrote. “But we judge it is the astir liable people of enactment to safeguard our assemblage and guarantee a graceful and unafraid wind-down.”
Launched during decentralized finance's (DeFi) 2021 boom, Alpaca rapidly roseate to prominence connected BNB Chain, offering leveraged output farming strategies that allowed users to amplify returns by borrowing superior to workplace liquidity excavation (LP) tokens.
At its peak, Alpaca held implicit $1 cardinal successful full worth locked (TVL) and was 1 of the most-used protocols connected the chain.
Internally, Alpaca had been operating astatine a nonaccomplishment for implicit 2 years, according to the team, with gross tied straight to protocol usage — a situation compounded by the project’s just motorboat operation with nary VC backing oregon pre-mined tokens.
The last stroke came successful precocious April, erstwhile Binance delisted ALPACA, the protocol’s autochthonal token.
While the lawsuit triggered a little 550% terms rally owed to abbreviated liquidations, including $55 cardinal successful forced closures successful a azygous day, it besides severely restricted liquidity and idiosyncratic entree to the token.
That, the squad said, made it harder to prosecute caller initiatives oregon strategical mergers.
“We explored M&A discussions with respective projects, and immoderate progressed meaningfully,” the squad said. “But arsenic the marketplace turned downward again successful aboriginal 2025, those deals fell through.”
ALPACA, the project’s token, was past trading astatine astir $0.08, down implicit 90% from its all-time precocious successful 2021.