RIP cryptocurrencies: Number of ‘dead’ coins up 35% over last year; tally nears 2,000-mark

The number of dead cryptocurrencies or crypto coins, which had minimal to zero benefits to anyone, has grown 35 per cent over last year to 1,949 at the time of filing this report, according to the data from Coinopsy.com that tracks dead cryptos. Around February last year, the number of total dead coins stood at over 1,440. The term dead coin is given to cryptos that don’t exist anymore due to multiple reasons. For instance, they are used as a scam, their website remains down, they have nodes or wallet issues, they have low liquidity or have simply been abandoned and their development has been halted by their developers. Abandoned coins are the ones that witness zero or negligible trading activity among investors. However, if there is a lack of information on the reasons why a coin died, it falls into the default abandoned category.

The rise in the number of such dead coins had gained momentum back in 2017 when a lot of entrepreneurs or businesses went for initial coin offerings (ICO) and had raised $4.9 billion during the year, as per Crunchbase. ICOs are meant to create new blockchain-based cryptos or related apps or services. According to CoinMarketCap, ICOs had raised the number of existing coins from 29 to more than 850 projects in 2017. In December last year, the total cryptos had reached close to 8,000. As of March 3, 2021, there were 9,108 cryptos in circulation led by Bitcoin and Ethereum.

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However, many of these coins have ceased to exist as they were either scams, jokes or they had never evolved. Joke projects or coins are those without a real or concrete plan and yet they look for investments. Despite that, there are few crypto enthusiasts who still invest their money in them. For instance, as per CoinMarketCap, Useless Ethereum Token (UET) was one such Joke coin that held an ICO and attracted more than $300,000. The existing over 9,000 cryptos have a combined market cap of $1.96 trillion of which bitcoin commands 60 per cent share ($1.11 trillion) and Ethereum 11 per cent ($243 billion). Bitcoin was trading at $59,661 while Ethereum was priced at $2,111 at the time of filing this report.