Coinopsy, a cryptocurrency “biopsy” website, estimates that there are more than 1,000 “dead” coins, Bloomberg reported.
Dead coins are those tokens that have been “abandoned, scammed, website dead, no nodes, wallet issues, no social updates, low volume or developers have walked away from the project.” Coinopsy lists a number of such tokens including BitConnect (BCC), Arcade Token (ARK), Ethereum Lite (ELITE), Veredictum (VENTANA), and several others.
Another website Deadcoins.com, offering a complete list of ICO exit scams and extinct coins, has listed more than 800 such coins.
Earlier this year, ICO advisory firm Satis Group in its analysis of ICO projects with market caps of over $50 million found that “approximately 81% of ICO’s were Scams, ~6% Failed, ~5% had Gone Dead, and ~8% went on to trade on an exchange.”
ICOs have attracted $11.92 billion so far this year, according to latest stats from CoinSchedule. With investors continuing to pump billions into ICOs, they stand to lose a considerable amount when these projects go dead.
"We will see a lot more abandoned ICO that never make it to an exchange," Richler Vanierwitz of Coinopsy, told Bloomberg in an email. "ICO investment will become very unprofitable.”
A new startup CoinJanitor has teamed up with Dead Coins and aims to “clean up crypto” – recycle failed tokens with market caps of under $50,000.
“The lists that CoinJanitor and Deadcoins.com can create together will allow users to contribute information and then see what both partners can do with it. This will help CoinJanitor to improve the process of locating dead coins out there. With the help of data processing tools, it will be possible to add features to these dead coin lists for the benefit of users,” the announcement reads.
