Alpaca Finance, once an cornerstone in the BNB chain and an early leader in leverage yield agriculture, will close operations at the end of 2025 due to an unsustainable business model in the middle of a more competitive and intensive deed landscape in capital.
The protocol said Monday that it will begin to write down all the products, including its original performance agriculture platform, automated and perpetual vaults, in the coming months.
Front access will remain available until December 31, 2025 to give users to withdraw their assets.
“This choice was not lightly,” the Alpaca team wrote. “But we believe it is the most responsible course of action to safeguard our community and guarantee an elegant and safe firm.”
During the 2021 boom of decentralized finance (Defi), Alpaca quickly amounted to fame in the BNB chain, offering leverage agriculture strategies that allowed users to amplify the returns when borrowing capital to tokens of agricultural liquidity accumulation (LP).
At its peak, Alpaca had more than $ 1 billion in total value blocked (TVL) and was one of the most used protocols in the chain.
Internally, Alpaca had been operating with a loss for more than two years, according to the equipment, with income directly linked to the use of the protocol, a challenge aggravated by the fair launch structure of the project without support of VC or pre-minted tokens.
The final blow came at the end of April, when Binance excluded Alpaca, the native protocol file.
Although the event triggered a brief price rally of 550% due to short liquidations, including $ 55 million in forced closures in a single day, also severely restricted the liquidity and access of users to the Token.
That, said the team, made it more difficult to look for new initiatives or strategic mergers.
“We explore the discussions of mergers and acquisitions with several projects, and some progressed significantly,” said the team. “But as the market returned down again in early 2025, those agreements failed.”
Alpaca, the token of the project, was last quoted to approximately $ 0.08, more than 90% from its historical maximum in 2021.
