As crypto scams keep increasing, 9% of existing cryptocurrencies have disappeared from the market.
Many investors play it safe and only trust relevant digital assets, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, or Binance Coin; stable coins like Tether or USD Coin, there are even those users who bet on meme coins, like Dogecoin. But some are risky (or very naive), decide to invest in shady and unknown projects, and often end up losing everything.
According to CoinMarketCap reports, there are 18,990 registered digital assets, and many got already measured up, but others have not; they even turned out to be part of scam schemes.
According to Finbold’s report, fed with data registered by 99Bitcoins, 1,705 of these digital assets have “died”; they have vanished from the market. That is, 9% of the existing digital currencies failed.
Among the examples are some projects, such as the case of BitConnect (BCC). Many other projects got also mentioned, including VegasCoin (VEGCOIN), Storeum, (STO), 1coin (ONE), Adrenaline Coin (ADN), Agrolot (AGLT), Beatlecoin (BEA), Bitcoin Platinum (BTP), Bitcoin Token (BTK), CannabisCoin (CANN), Demoncoin (DMC), among others.
In the 99Bitcoins list, you can observe each of these failed projects and why they are no longer active in the market. Among them: missing website, inactive social networks, not listed on any exchange, or due to a stopped development.
Finbold highlights that the vast majority of inactive coins are digital tokens that turned out to be scam schemes, which got abandoned by their teams, lacked funds, or failed for some different reason, and are no longer enabled for users to get them. On rare occasions, some of these coins may come back to life and increase in value if they gain enough relevance.
BitConnect’s Case
One of these coins is BitConnect, as the team spent a lot of investment on marketing only to become a massive Ponzi scheme that gathered over $2 billion from victims.
In addition to the 1,700 names on the list, some showed potential for similar reasons; one of these coins is SafeMoon, which many experts warned was a coin.
Recently, its former head of marketing, Ben Philips, got caught up in a classic $12 million pump-and-dump scheme. He used his skills and influence over the environment to “inflate” the token price and got to negotiate it at inflated prices.
Another short-lived coin that caught many victims was the Squid Game (SQUID) cryptocurrency inspired by the famous Korean Netflix show The Squid Games, whose value went down to almost zero six months ago after the project disappeared from the network.
According to the SQUID’s CoinMarketCap page notification, the project is now apparently run by the community after developers pocketed millions. Some investors reported how they lost their investments and savings in this scam.
By: Jenson Nuñez
