A Dead Coin refers to any coin or token that is no longer in use.

Various reasons exist why a coin is no longer viable, including:

  • Being an outright scam, which was later revealed to the users and crypto public
  • Developers abandoned the project, ultimately getting it delisted from exchanges
  • The coin started out as a legitimate coin with a legitimate use case and gained a following and users, but then the mission or developmental milestones of the project weren’t met, and no benefit was deemed possible if the project continued
  • The official website of a coin is offline or unreachable
  • Funding for the development team has dried up
  • The coin was started as a joke but still obtained a sizeable investment that wasn’t expected

ICOs, or initial coin offerings, helped to fuel the number of active projects in 2017 from under 50 to almost 1000.

By 2020, that number reached 8,000 cryptocurrencies, many of which didn’t survive due to the points outlined above.

A post-mortem analysis of all 2017 ICOs has determined that 80% of all ICOs that took place that year were scams totaling more than USD $1 billion.