Explore the cemetery of cryptocurrencies: Who killed the altcoin?

Source / LongHash

Halloween is coming, and on this holiday we will visit the cemetery of cryptocurrency. I didn't expect the cryptocurrency market to enter the WTO shortly after, and witnessed the death of so many projects. The Coinopsy and DeadCoins websites also made anatomical reports on these projects.

For the sake of entertainment, we took a deeper look at Coinopsy's data, analyzed the reasons for the failure of these projects, and found some interesting things.

Coinopsy has uploaded 700 entries in 8 years and is one of the most comprehensive sites for failed projects. However, that being said, the data is crowdsourced and not very complete, so it may not be as accurate.

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In addition, the website data is not presented in tabular form and cannot be downloaded, so the data used in our analysis is manually collected.

Why do these cryptocurrency items fail?

 

Coinopsy's data provides several different "causes of death." The most common is “abandoned”, that is, simply the investor no longer trades a currency to zero (or tend to zero) the volume of the transaction. 63.1% of the projects ended in this form.

Another batch of projects failed because of (suspicious) fraud – up to 29.9% of projects on Coinopsy fall into this category. Most of these alleged fraudulent projects appeared in 2017, most likely when the bull market went out of control. In this dataset, the number of scammers in 2017 was more than five times that of the previous year.

Interestingly, the data also mentions the founders of some projects. There are two founders, one is the Bitcointalk user named "Crunck" and the other is Daniel Mendoza. The two have each launched three projects, all of which are listed as liar projects (again, the data is for the masses together) It is not necessarily accurate.

Other reasons for the death of the encryption project were ICO failure (3.6%) and the obvious “spoof” project (3.2%), such as “AnalCoin”, “BagCoin”, and “BieberCoin”.

 

How many failed projects are there in total?

 

We can't say exactly how many projects have failed. This answer depends to some extent on how you judge the life and death of a project. Coinopsy currently lists 705 items, DeadCoins lists 1779 items, and CoinMarketCap has more than 1,000 items with a daily transaction volume of less than $1,000 – even if there is no “definite death”, it is equivalent to a “death” project. .

Of course, the data of these three websites overlap, but there may be other failed projects, especially some international projects that do not use English as the main language, because the three websites mentioned above are mainly oriented to English-speaking audience.

How long have these failed projects survived?

 

One of the most interesting things about Coinopsy data is that each failed project has a "birth" and "death" time, so that we can roughly calculate the survival time of each project.

Not surprisingly, the “abandoned” project – the ones that were already on track but ultimately failed to retain investors – survived for the longest, with an average life of 1.7 years. This was followed by an ICO failure project with an average survival of 1.6 years. The spoof project is enough for everyone to laugh for 1.4 years. Fraud projects have the shortest lifespan and die on average for about a year.

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