In January 2026, it'll be seventeen years since Satoshi mined the Genesis block of Bitcoin. After lots of ups and downs, as well as lots of innovation and experimentation in the altcoin space, it's now clear what needs to be in place to have a successful cryptocurrency. In no particular order:
It needs to be easy to buy
Your coin needs to be on as many exchanges as possible. Most people will only go through the hassle of doing the KYC for one or two exchanges. After they're signed up, they stick to trading the coins listed on that exchange. If it's not listed on the exchange they use, they won't trade it.
How did a coin like Doge, which hasn't had any new development for years, become a top ten coin? Well, it was so much fun when it launched and had such a big community, all the early exchanges listed it for free. Once it was listed everywhere, people used it to move money. And because it was everywhere it was easy to buy when someone like Musk started promoting it.
How did Tron become a top ten coin? Justin Sun paid to get listings everywhere. Once it was everywhere, stablecoins looking for a cheaper alternative to Eth started to use Tron's layer2. Because if you are going to use stablecoins to move money instead of Doge, the rails the stablecoins operate on need to be on every exchange.
It's not an accident that bitcoin only cleared $100,000 after bitcoin ETFs were launched in 2024. People who were reluctant to open an account on a crypto exchange (because they were scared by the collapse of FTX, and previously of Mt-Gox), could now buy into Bitcoin ETFs through their existing broker accounts. So a new set of buyers entered the bitcoin space.
If your coin is on a few lonely DEXs, or listed on small obscure exchanges, and you are expecting users to jump through multiple hoops to buy the coin, you are going to be disappointed. No matter how wonderful the features and development on your coin are, no-one is going to do all the work coming to you.
Marketing
Old hands will remember when Ethereum launched, because what made it different was the marketing. They managed to get a puff piece in the New York Times in their first month. Until that moment the NYT had been scornful of bitcoin and crypto in general. But it made an exception for Ethereum at it's launch. Amazing!
All crypto enthusiasts on reddit got spammed with direct messages promoting Ethereum. They literally scraped the bitcoin subreddit and sent messages to anyone who had ever commented there. It was crude but effective - even if just 5% of bitcoiners bought ETH, it was enough to launch it into the top ten as the early alt space was small. (Making sure Eth was on all the exchanges made it easy to buy).
Doge took off organically - it was the original meme coin, launched as a joke. But it had such a huge community of people saying "Much Wow" and using the doge tipbot to tip coins to random people on reddit for fun, news of it spread rapidly. Everyone likes receiving freebies. And the tippers didn't mind distributing coins because at the time each doge was worth $0.00000001 or so.
The exchanges rushed to cash in by listing it. Which meant that when Musk started doing late night ketamine-fueled tweets about Doge which went viral, Doge surged again.
Our third example is Trumpcoin (proper name: Official Trump). He waited till after the inauguration to launch it. Knowing that all the exchanges would rush to list it for free straight away ("It's the President's coin!")
Of course all his supporters in the crypto world rushed to buy it, some selling their bitcoin to buy TRUMP. His marketing to them was done in the lead up to the Nov 2024 election, promising to be a crypto-friendly president. In that first week after the inauguration, they were primed to buy whatever he was selling them.
Scarcity
When bitcoin launched, it famously had a hard limit on the number of coins that would be issued. It was meant to be a hard digital alternative to gold for people who were worried about the debasement of fiat, but did not want the inconvenience of storing physical gold.
But look at the crypto space now. It went from 6 altcoins in 2013, each with a cap on the number of coins issued, to 443,513 altcoins by 2021, some with no cap on the number of coins issued.
Since then the alt space has grown like topsy:
Remember there are only 180 fiat currencies in the world, and the total global money supply is growing at 8% per annum.
While the total supply of altcoins is growing thousands of times faster - remember, many of the alts being launched have no caps on the amounts of coins issued. Is it any wonder that the price of some alts has been steadily dropping?
Some of these altcoins need to be delisted so they can quietly die.
The remaining alts need to start burning coins to shrink supply. Some alts have already started doing this.
In 2021, Ethereum decided to build a coin burning mechanism into their alt: the EIP-1559 protocol entails that with every transaction conducted on the Ethereum blockchain, a fraction of the transaction fee or gas fees will be burnt. As of the time of writing, 5330854.0 ETH have been burned. The burn rate depends on the number of transactions taking place each day. Between 2022 and 2024, Eth turned deflationary as more coins were burned than issued through staking.
Binance Coin (BNB) is also burning a fraction of it's transaction fees to reduce the supply of coins. As at the time of writing, they've burned 274,756.41 BNB.
In Oct 2024 Tron burned 10 million coins. At the time the price was $0.16, so it cost about $800,000. The price is now $0.31, so the strategy worked.
This is a start, but other coins need to join in, and the burn rate needs to be much higher to cull the dreadful over supply of altcoins on the market.
And there you go. That is the recipe for a successful cryptocurrency.