Mathieu Baudet, founder of the blockchain project Linera, announced on September 19 via Discord that the company will immediately cease operations due to a recent fundraising round failing to meet targets. The team stated that this closure is solely due to funding issues and is unrelated to the project's technology or team capabilities.

The immediate trigger was the lackluster public sale of the LNRA token on the token sale platform Sonar: this round attracted 617 participants with a total committed amount of $848,271 (in USDC), only reaching 57% of the $1.5 million minimum threshold required to complete the sale; as a result of not meeting the target, the sale could not be finalized, and the team has refunded all subscription funds to participants, with no tokens distributed.

After the token sale failure, the team attempted to find new investors for emergency financing, hoping to maintain the development pace and support the project until the mainnet launch; however, negotiations did not yield sufficient funds, making it impossible to sustain the previous development speed or cover all costs needed for the mainnet launch, leading the team to decide to shut down the project completely.

Linera is a Layer 1 blockchain project focused on a "microchains" architecture, aiming to split on-chain activities that were originally centralized on a single execution flow into multiple smaller parallel chains to handle them separately. The target applications are those requiring high responsiveness and high concurrency, such as real-time markets and trading platforms. The project had previously raised approximately $12 million: $6 million in a seed round led by a16z in June 2022, with follow-on investments from Cygni Capital, Kima Ventures, Tribe Capital, and others; in August 2023, it completed an additional $6 million round led by Borderless Capital.

The team stated that related applications and services will gradually shut down, and the Discord community channel will also go offline; previously accumulated "community points" from community activities will continue to be recorded but will not carry any token rights or guarantees of established rights. The project currently has no new timeline or alternative funding sources for completing protocol development, and the mainnet launch plan is now shelved and remains incomplete.

From an industry perspective, this incident reflects the ongoing tightening of the fundraising environment for infrastructure projects in the crypto industry: even with approximately $12 million in investments from well-known institutions including a16z, Linera still failed to attract sufficient retail and community funding during the public token sale phase to complete the final round of financing, indicating a significant decline in market valuation and confidence in new Layer 1 infrastructure projects, especially at a stage where the project has not yet launched its mainnet and lacks verification of actual on-chain activity. This puts pressure on all participants who subscribed but did not receive tokens, as well as institutional investors who previously invested in the seed and follow-on rounds; comparatively, market funds are increasingly concentrating on mature public chain projects that have already launched their mainnets and possess actual usage data.

According to industry data platform RootData, Linera's previous investors also included institutions such as GSR, Flow Traders, and Laser Digital; as of the project's closure, its mainnet had never officially launched.

Source: Public Information