Number of ‘dead’ coins surpasses 1,700 as hits increase

In the market that currently has almost 19,000 cryptocurrencies and in which investors are, every day, looking for crypto assets that will “bomb”, scams and fake cryptocurrencies also thrive.

According to 99Bitcoin data, there are currently over 1,700 dead cryptocurrencies. Not to mention the scams built on ETH and BNBChain that “disguise” themselves as cryptocurrencies, but are actually malicious smart contracts that steal from users.

The data also shows that more than 1,705 cryptocurrencies were born as value propositions and that they would “revolutionize” the market. But today its value is zero.

The list contains notable examples such as BitConnect (BCC), which even appeared in CoinMarketCap’s Top-10; in addition to other projects such as VegasCoin (VEGCOIN) and Storeum (EST).

Dead cryptocurrencies

The cryptocurrencies that ended up dying are actually tokens that turned out to be scams. That is, that they were abandoned by their teams, that they lost liquidity due to problems or that they ended up failing in their purpose.

On rare occasions, some of these coins can come back to life and increase in value if they gather enough interest. Therefore, it all depends on the community, and with decentralized exchanges, users can add liquidity to a given trading pair and even “resurrect” dead coins.

However, the list of dead cryptocurrencies tends to grow as other projects begin to show serious signs.

One is SafeMoon, which many analysts warn is a token destined to be a scam. Recently, her former head of marketing, Ben Philips, was caught up in a classic “pump-and-dump” scheme that brought in $12 million.

Another is cryptocurrency Squid Game (SQUID), inspired by Netflix’s popular Korean sitcom Round 6, which also saw its value drop to near zero about six months ago after the project went offline.

According to the notification on SQUID’s CoinMarketCap page, “the project is now ostensibly run by the community” after the developers made off with millions.

Unfortunately, SQUID investors are far from the only ones to be caught off guard by cryptocurrency scammers in so-called ‘rug pulls’, a colloquial name for this type of crypto scam.

In 2021, around $2.8 billion in assets were stolen due to these schemes, representing an average of more than $7 million/day.