On March 24, 2025, Lnfi Network announced the postponement of TGE. This is the second postponement of Lnfi Network in the past seven months.
Looking at the current status of BTC ecological projects, the second postponement of Lnfi Network is also a microcosm of the entire ecological dilemma under market fluctuations and industry fatigue.
The crisis of trust behind the second postponement
Lnfi Network (formerly NostrAssets), as a BTC Layer 2.5 solution, aims to introduce Web3 and tokenization to the Lightning Network and launch corresponding DeFi solutions.
However, the project was postponed without any clear explanation on the specific time of restart, additional work to be prepared or compensation plan for early participants, and only gave the excuse of poor market conditions.
It is worth noting that as early as August 7, 2024, the project party postponed the release of its core products LN Bridge and LN Exchange due to the same market downturn.
In an environment where the BTC ecosystem is developing slowly and investors are becoming more cautious, Lnfi Networks repeated delays with unclear reasons will inevitably further erode community trust. Even though it has attracted seed round investments from institutions such as HashKey Capital, UTXO Management, CMS Holdings, and Waterdrip Capital, it is not enough to cover up the communitys discussion on issues such as the projects lack of execution and untimely information disclosure.
Misalignment between vision and reality
Although the market seemed to pick up at the end of March, the embarrassing situation of BTC ecological projects such as Lnfi Network may be the deeper reason for postponing TGE again.
In the second half of this round of market upswing, 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 appear incompatible with the current market atmosphere.
Dune public data shows that as of March 24, 2025, the daily transaction volume of the BTC ecosystem reached approximately 483,600 transactions, of which regular BTC transfers were approximately 281,400 transactions, accounting for 58.2%; the daily transaction volume of the Runes protocol was approximately 156,800 transactions, accounting for 32.4%; the daily transaction volume of BRC 20 tokens was approximately 44,600 transactions, accounting for 9.2%; the daily transaction volume of Inscriptions was only 807 transactions, accounting for 0.2%.
Compared with the peak of more than 1 million daily transactions in the same period last year (among which the Runes protocol’s highest daily transaction volume reached more than 600,000 transactions), the current overall transaction volume of the BTC ecosystem has declined significantly, down about 53% year-on-year.
Specifically, the transaction volume of the Runes protocol has dropped sharply from about 600,000 transactions per day at its peak in 2024 to about 156,800 transactions at present, a drop of more than 70%. Although the BRC 20 token was once driven by the memecoin craze to achieve transaction growth, the recent average daily transaction volume has remained in the range of 40,000 to 50,000 transactions, and has not been able to continue to drive the activity of the overall ecosystem. Inscriptions transactions have almost disappeared, accounting for only a very small part of the total transaction volume (less than 1%).
Overall, Bitcoin on-chain transactions have returned to being dominated by regular BTC transfers, reflecting that the market has gradually returned to rationality after a brief boom in memecoin and emerging protocols, and the proportion of speculative trading activities has significantly decreased.
Ecological dilemma
Lnfi Network’s predicament is not an isolated case. The postponement of its TGE also reflects the common predicament faced by the entire BTC ecosystem project.
Although Layer 2 and related solutions were once highly anticipated by the market to improve the scalability and functionality of the Bitcoin network, the road to technological breakthroughs is still full of thorns: some DeFi protocols increase the complexity of the ecosystem and need to strike a balance between security and ease of use; the Lightning Network may have insufficient liquidity and centralization risks; although the Layer 2 solution improves scalability, it still faces challenges in truly achieving high throughput, low fees, and ensuring bridge security and user-friendliness.
BTC ecosystem projects are not only limited by technical bottlenecks and market fluctuations, but also face trust issues from users and the community. After years of market development, users have become more cautious about new projects.
Against the backdrop of an increasing number of projects and frequent delays, even as institutional funds continue to inflow to drive market value growth, investor participation is slowing down. Compared to investing in riskier BTC sidechains or DeFi projects, investors are more inclined to hold Bitcoin in search of stable returns from price increases.
According to incomplete statistics from ChainCatcher, among the BTC ecosystem projects, the monthly TVL changes of the vast majority of projects showed negative growth. This shows that during the statistical period, the overall capital inflow of BTC ecosystem projects was not optimistic, and generally showed a negative growth trend.
Even though the BTC ecosystem still has an inherent consensus advantage, if it cannot find a balance between the implementation of new technologies and user trust, many projects, including Lnfi Network, may further sink in the market volatility and industry fatigue.
