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ROUTE Router Protocol announced the closure of remaining cross-chain infrastructure and the destruction of 303 million ROUTE tokens
After more than four years of development, Router Protocol announced that it will shut down its remaining cross-chain infrastructure. The project, which was financially supported by Coinbase Ventures, Polygon and other major cryptocurrency investors, is now officially coming to an end. All operations will be phased out before September 30, and 303,333,198 ROUTE tokens held in the project treasury will be permanently destroyed.
The centralized exchange will decide at its discretion when to terminate ROUTE's trading, recharge and withdrawal services. Therefore, holders need to pay close attention to the deadline announcements for the specific platform on which their tokens are located.
Bridging revenue cannot cover infrastructure costs
In the past two years, tightening liquidity in Web3, capital transfers to artificial intelligence, and increasingly fierce competition in cross-chain infrastructure have led to a significant reduction in costs incurred by asset transfers between networks. Router's remaining bridging revenue is no longer able to support infrastructure and development costs.
In the past year, the team has worked hard to advance commercial cooperation, technology licensing and possible acquisitions, but failed to reach an agreement to maintain operations. In addition, Router previously used historical agreement fees to repurchase and destroy ROUTE tokens rather than establishing sufficient operating reserves.
This economic pressure is similar to the situation that forces other infrastructure projects to exit. For example, Bitcoin Layer 2 Botanix, backed by Polychain, was closed due to insufficient transaction demand to support network costs;Mynth also announced a reduction in Novaswap's business because cross-chain usage did not reach the level needed to maintain the hosting infrastructure.
Destroy 303 million ROUTE to remove treasury supplies
The number of tokens planned to be destroyed this time exceeds 30% of ROUTE's original maximum supply of 1 billion. These tokens are currently held in the treasury and are not in circulation in the market, so destroying them would directly reduce the maximum supply without having to withdraw the same amount of tokens from current holders or moderate amounts of exchange liquidity.
As of September 7, ROUTE prices were approximately US$0.00076, down approximately 48% from the previous week, after hitting a record low of US$0.00003970 on September 5. Its market value has dropped to about US$51,000, with approximately 679 million pieces in circulation, and trading is mainly concentrated in illiquid markets such as KuCoin and Gate.
With operations suspended, Router will not launch any new ROUTE plans. The liquidity pool or market created after the official exchange is removed will operate independently of the project, and some Router technology will be released as open source software.
Router Chain closure marks a prelude to full store closure
Router raised US$4.1 million in 2021, with investors including Coinbase Ventures, Polygon, Wintermute, Alameda Research and others. Since then, the project has expanded its cross-chain offerings and launched Router Chain in July 2024.
However, the Layer 1 network has only been running for over a year. The Router Chain Sunset Plan released in September 2025 indicates that the project decided not to maintain its own proof-of-stake (PoS) network because infrastructure costs, validator inflation and security requirements consume significant resources that could have been redirected to its Open Graph architecture.
This strategic transformation ultimately failed to produce a sustainable independent business. The remaining services of Router are expected to be completely shut down on September 30, 2026. Before the completion of liquidation, each exchange will successively announce their respective ROUTE removal and withdrawal deadlines.
