Behind the postponement of TGE by Lnfi Network, the BTC ecosystem continues to be weak. Is there any rescue in the future?

Author: 0xLayman, ChainCatcher

Edited by: TB, ChainCatcher

On March 24, 2025, Lnfi Network announced the postponement of TGE, which is the second time that Lnfi Network has delayed in the past seven months.

Focusing on the current status of BTC ecological projects, Lnfi Network 's second delay is also a microcosm of the entire ecological dilemma under market volatility and industry fatigue.

The crisis of trust behind the second delay

Lnfi Network (formerly NostrAssets) is a BTC Layer 2.5 solution that aims to introduce Web3 and tokenization into the Lightning Network and launch corresponding DeFi solutions.

However, the project postponement did not make clear explanations on the specific time of restart, the additional work required to be prepared, or the compensation plan for early participants, and only gave the statement of "poor market conditions".

It is worth noting that as early as August 7, 2024, the project party delayed the release of its core products LN Bridge and LN Exchange on the grounds of the same "market downturn".

In an environment where the development of the BTC ecosystem is generally slow and the investor mentality is becoming increasingly cautious, Lnfi Network's behavior of "repeated delays and vague reasons" will inevitably further consume the trust of the community. Even if it has attracted seed round investment from institutions such as HashKey Capital, UTXO Management, CMS Holdings, and Waterdrip Capital in the past, it is not enough to cover up the community's discussions on the project party's insufficient execution ability and untimely information disclosure.

Vision and reality are misaligned

Although the market seems to be picking up at the end of March, the embarrassing situation in which BTC ecological projects such as Lnfi Network are located may be the deeper reason for its delay in TGE again.

In the second half of this round of market upward cycle, the market focus is more on short-term speculative assets such as memecoin, which further weakens the overall attractiveness of the Bitcoin ecosystem and makes the long-term DeFi vision of a number of BTC ecosystem projects such as Lnfi Network seem out of place with the current market atmosphere.

Dune public data shows that as of March 24, 2025, the daily trading volume of the BTC ecosystem reached about 483,600, of which about 281,400 regular BTC transfers were about 58.2%; the daily trading volume of the Runes protocol was about 156,800, accounting for 32.4%; the daily trading volume of BRC20 tokens was about 44,600, accounting for 9.2%; the daily trading volume of Inscriptions was only 807, accounting for 0.2%.

Compared with the peak of the daily trading volume that once exceeded 1 million transactions in the same period last year (of which the highest daily trading volume of the Runes Agreement reached more than 600,000 transactions), the current overall trading volume of the BTC ecosystem has dropped significantly, down about 53% year-on-year.

Specifically, the volume of the Runes protocol has dropped sharply from about 600,000 transactions per day in the peak of 2024 to about 156,800 transactions, a drop of more than 70%. Although the BRC20 token was once driven by the memecoin boom to achieve trading volume growth, the average daily trading volume has remained in the range of 40,000 to 50,000 transactions recently, and has not been able to continue to drive the overall ecological activity. Inscriptions transactions have almost subsided, accounting for only a very small percentage of the total transaction volume (less than 1%).

Overall, Bitcoin on-chain transactions have returned to a state that is dominated by conventional BTC transfers, reflecting that the market has gradually returned to rationality after experiencing a short craze of memecoin and emerging agreements, and the proportion of speculative trading activities has decreased significantly.

Ecological difficulties

The dilemma of Lnfi Network is not an isolated case. The delay in TGE also reflects the common dilemma faced by the entire BTC ecological project.

Although Layer 2 and related solutions have been highly expected by the market to improve the scalability and functionality of the Bitcoin network, the technological breakthrough path is still full of thorns: some DeFi protocols increase ecological complexity and need to balance security and ease of use; Lightning Network may have risks of insufficient liquidity and centralization; although Layer 2 solutions improve scalability, they still face challenges in truly achieving high throughput, low fees, and ensuring bridging security and user-friendliness.

BTC ecological projects are not only limited by technical bottlenecks and market fluctuations, but also need to face trust issues from users and the community. After years of market development, users' attitudes towards new projects have become more cautious.

Against the backdrop of increasing number of projects and frequent delays, even if the continuous inflow of institutional funds drives market value growth, investors' participation speed is slowing down. Compared with BTC sidechain or DeFi projects with higher risk investment, investors are more inclined to hold Bitcoin in order to seek stable returns brought by price increases.

According to incomplete statistics from ChainCatcher, in the BTC ecological projects, the monthly TVL changes of the vast majority of projects show negative growth. This shows that during the statistical cycle, the overall capital inflow of BTC ecological projects is not optimistic and generally shows a negative growth trend.

Even though the BTC ecosystem still has innate consensus advantages, if it cannot find a balance between the implementation of new technologies and user trust, many projects, including Lnfi Network, may further sink into market fluctuations and industry fatigue.