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The bitcoin bubble at the end of 2017 saw thousands of new cryptocurrencies enter the market and compete for the attention of investors consumed by global hype and the prospect of getting rich quick.
These Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) hoovered up money from gullible investors using little more that some code and a speculative white paper outlining the coin’s ambition.
However with bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency having plummeted from over $19,000 in December last year to just over $6,000 today, the enthusiasm for lesser-known coins has also dropped.
Deadcoin.com has been busy listing all the crypto scams, jokes and abandoned projects and the list has now hit 800 cryptocurrencies, considered ‘dead’ - trading at less than 1 cent.
The 800 'dead' coins include the Detector token (DTCT) after it was listed on the site as has having "no communication or tweets for over 8 months now."
SipsCo (SIPS) Сoin "died after 10 days on coinexchange".
Bchconnect (bchc) is described as a "lending scamcoin."
Another coin named ‘Useless Ethereum’, currently valued at $0.013425, was launched as a joke, poking fun of just how willing investors were to invest cash in projects without considering the consequences.
On the underlying value of their proposition, Useless Ethereum said: “You’re going to give some random person on the internet money, and they’re going to take it and go buy stuff with it.
“Probably electronics, to be honest. Maybe even a big-screen television. Seriously, don’t buy these tokens.”
Despite this warning, a investigation from Which? reports that the coin’s launch raised $30,000 and still has a market capitalisation of $53,240 according to CoinMarketCap.
The failure of the 800 coins is expected to have burnt though billions of dollars with companies raising a massive $3.8 billion via ICOs in 2017.
However, the money lost could yet increase with a massive $13.7billion raised the first six months of 2018. Contelegraph warn that some $1 billion of that was raised by coins that are now considered ‘dead’.
For those who put money into obscure cryptocurrencies the misery is set to continue with Bloomberg warning last month that most money has been sunk into “scams”.
Predicting more misery for investors, analyst Aaron Brown, said: “There has obviously been significant fraud and hype in the ICO market. I have seen 80 percent of ICOs were frauds, and 10 percent lacked substance and failed shortly after raising money.
“Most of the remaining 10 percent will probably fail as well.”
Data from Satis Group, an ICO advisory and analysis firm, claims that over 80 percent of ICOs with a $50 million market cap and above are scams. Another 11 percent of projects have according to the research, failed or gone silent.