When Bitcoin, Ethereum and some others were experiencing massive growth, many new cryptocurrencies were launched in the hopes to piggyback the trend and become successful.
While new initial coin offerings (ICO) kept hitting the cryptocurrency marketplace, not all have been successful. In fact, a huge number of them were actually scam.
DeadCoins.com which tracks ICO exit scams, extinct coins as well as near-extinct ones, has identified around 800 coins that are considered "dead," or defined as those with value less than a single cent. Those coins were either scam, suffered an irrecoverable hack, went silent, or was simply a joke coin.
The teams behind most of those dead coins have either used ICOs to raise funds and cashout during peak performance, or have just given up.
The plunge of cryptocurrencies started early in 2018.
At that time, thousands of new cryptocurrencies entered the market and compete for the attention of investors consumed by global hype and the prospect of becoming rich quickly. Bitcoin which is the most popular cryptocurrency, started losing its performance.
Its value dropped significantly, that investment bank Morgan Stanley said that Bitcoin's decline was 15 times faster than the dot-com bubble burst of 2000.
This affected the cryptocurrency market in overall, because the enthusiasm for lesser-known coins has also dropped. Some sentiments also came after two South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges were hacked with millions of crypto tokens stolen.
When the news about the 800 dead cryptocurrencies broke, Bitcoin held only 30 percent of its record high.
It is claimed that over 80 percent of ICOs with a $50 million market cap and above are scams. Nearly half of all ICOs launched in 2017 have completely failed for one reason or another, with 11 percent of them have gone silent.
With hundreds of coins considered dead, it is said that they have burnt though billions of dollars with companies raising a massive $3.8 billion via ICOs in 2017.
in the first 6 months of 2018, there was an increase of investment to up to $13.7 billion. However, Contelegraph speculated that some $1 billion of that are already "dead" in about a month time.
Investor Warren Buffet has repeatedly criticized Bitcoin to have no intrinsic value. He even called cryptocurrencies as "rat poison squared." During one of his interviews, Buffet said:
Despite the number of dead coins, optimism continues to persist even in challenging times. With cryptocurrencies have yet to be adopted as a mainstream mode of payment, technological advances and updates continue to enhance their usefulness.
