One of the signs of a highly active market is, ironically, the significant number of failed projects. This is now true of the cryptocurrency market, which has over 800 dead coins, according to an analysis of market data provided by Dead Coins.
Dead Coins takes a look at coins across the market and considers one “dead” if it either suffered an irrecoverable hack, it was a scam, it stopped all its activity, or it was simply a joke coin.
It takes a lot of endurance for a coin to survive in this competitive market. Bitcoin, for example, has been through several changes and major hacks.
When the Mt. Gox incident happened in 2014, the exchange reported losses of over 850,000 BTC, accounting for over 7% of the entire supply at the time. This created a significant loss of trust in the cryptocurrency market but failed to damage investor trust in Bitcoin itself.
The key here is that Bitcoin remained resilient because of the rock-solid reputation of its blockchain. It is extraordinarily difficult to reproduce that in a brand new coin that has yet to prove itself.
Ethereum somehow managed, but the numerous ICOs that operate on its blockchain don’t usually rise to stardom. TRON and EOS are exceptions to the rule, as nearly half of all ICOs launched in 2017 have completely failed for one reason or another.
This doesn’t account for the amount of ICOs that haven’t failed entirely but lose steam after their launches. These coins almost inevitably become relegated to the graveyard that is DeadCoins.com, which even provides links to the coins’ charts where visitors could watch a snapshot of their tragic endings.
Given how the cryptocurrency market has been like the wild west (something that is likely to change soon), teams behind most of the coins have either used them to raise funds, cashout during peak market movements or have just given up. Either way, now, with regulators, such as the SEC, taking note of crypto-related frauds, things may change for the better.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
