Botanix Labs is pulling the plug on Spiderchain, its Bitcoin layer-2 network, after roughly one year of mainnet operation. The phased shutdown, announced around June 10, 2026, gives users until July 9 to withdraw their assets before the Federation validator group takes over management of any remaining funds.
The project raised $11.5 million from investors including Polychain Capital and Placeholder. It processed approximately 25 million transactions across around 200,000 wallets. And it still couldn’t make the economics work.
The demand problem nobody wants to talk about
Botanix cited low demand for Bitcoin-native DeFi and programmable BTC use cases as the core reason for the shutdown. The network simply couldn’t generate enough fee revenue to cover its infrastructure costs.
Bitcoin has been trading between $61,000 and $65,000 during 2026 sell-offs, a significant decline from the euphoric peaks of 2025. Non-BTC tokens have been particularly battered since late 2024, draining the speculative energy that many of these layer-2 networks depend on for user activity and liquidity.
