Over 260 ICOs Fail To Survive the 2018 Bear Market

According to Coinopsy, a total of 264 altcoins including 144 ICOs launched in 2017 failed to survive the 2018 bear market.

Coinopsy is a website that keeps an active catalog of all the dead cryptocurrencies. Coinopsy defines a dead cryptocurrency as a coin or token that has been scammed, abandoned or the website is unavailable. Projects that developers have walked away have low volumes, wallet issues, or no social updates are considered dead coins.

Two of the project that didn’t survive last year (the Scorecoin and Philosopher Stones) failed for the second time. Both launched in 2013 and failed the following year, apparently before resurrecting in 2017 as a response to the bull market.

Coinopsy classifies dead coins into four categories determined by whether the failure of the cryptocurrency resulted from a joke, an abandoned project, a scam, or an initial coin offering.

According to Coinopsy, 55% of the failed cryptocurrencies comprised of ICOs launched in the preceding year. That highlights the risks involved in investing in initial coin offerings.

The list mainly comprises scammed ICOs such as Dimoncoin, a project that was built with a loophole in its smart contracts, allowing the creator to bag unlimited tokens. Projects that were abandoned by the developers were the second-largest category, comprising of 27% of the total death toll in 2018. That was a total of 73 altcoins, including India Coin, Rare Pepe Party, and Masternode Community Coin.

Additionally, 20% of the tokens that failed were suspected of scams, with about 55 projects being accused of fraud.