More than a thousand of crypto projects are “already dead” as of June 30, 2018, according to a recent TechCrunch report. The news outlet has based its claim on data from two websites: Coinopsy and DeadCoins.
Coinopsy provides daily reviews of various cryptocurrencies, including ones that are already “dead.” It defines a “dead” token as exhibiting at least one of the following: “abandoned, scammed, website dead, no nodes, wallet issues, no social updates, low volume or developers have walked away from the project.”
According to Coinopsy’s list, there are 247 “dead” coins as of press time. These include the notorious Bitconnect that was shut down in January 2018 and is described by the website as “the most successful ponzi-scheme in crypto so far.”
DeadCoins similarly has a 830-item long list of “dead” cryptocurrencies. Among them is the recent Titanium Blockchain Infrastructure Services initial coin offering (ICO) that was shut down by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for fraudulent practices.
According to the SEC’s press release, Titanium has raised $21 million from investors from the U.S. and other countries. In its statement, the SEC warned investors about ICOs as an extremely risky type of investment:
“Having filed multiple cases involving allegedly fraudulent ICOs, we again encourage investors to be especially cautious when considering these as investments.”
As Cointelegraph reported Friday, the volume of ICOs has reached $13.7 billion in 2018 so far, which is already twice as much as the market amounted to in the entire 2017. According to TechCrunch, scam and dead ICOs raised $1 billion in 2017.
On June 21, Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman warned that ICOs pose “serious risks” for retail investors, claiming that projects that raise money this way have “almost no oversight.”
Earlier in June, crypto evangelist John McAfee said that he will stop promoting ICOs due to alleged threats from the SEC.