Several websites claim that between 2019 and 500 digital currencies went bankrupt in 1.000. However, an agreement cannot be found to establish more precisely the value of that figure. In general, dead currencies are what were scams or were connected to scams, part of projects that never delivered a product, have a dead website, were abandoned by their founders or have extremely high trading volumes and adoption rates low or zero, etc.
DeadCoins.com is one of the websites that track failed cryptocurrency projects and currently 1.839 have been counted since 2017.
The available data claim there have been
- 674 currencies died in 2017
- 647 currencies died in 2018
- 518 dead currencies in 2019.
As can be seen in 2019 there has been a collapse of about 20% compared to the previous two years.
Another site that addresses the same theme is Coinopsy, which shows 1.407 projects that failed from 2013 onwards. The data show, in addition to 85 currencies whose death is marked as "current":
- 2 currencies died in 2013
- 209 currencies died in 2014
- 235 currencies died in 2015
- 169 currencies died in 2016
- 223 currencies died in 2017
- 399 currencies died in 2018
- 85 dead currencies in 2019.
Unlike DeadCoins, Coinopsy shows an annual increase in bankruptcies (except in 2016). However, 2019 shows a much lower number of dead currencies, -79% compared to 2018; but since the data is crowdsourced, there is still a possibility that the site will update this value in the near future.
CoinCodeCap is also examining the GitHub activity of the projects as a way to verify their overall activity, purpose and dedication to the project. If a project has not had a single line of code in the past 90 days or more, it is declared dead. In a September report, their team writes that they analyzed 2.071 projects and found that 638 currencies didn't release a single code in 2019, a number very close to that of DeadCoin. However, according to CoinCodeCap research, there has not been a decline, but an increase since 2018, when this number was 466. Shortly thereafter, in October, they published a report in which analyzes were published on 3.162 projects of which 1.240 they are dead.
That said, the fact remains that many currencies will likely disappear in this new year, although it will be interesting to see if the trend will be down or not.
Numerous industry experts have made their predictions for 2020, such as those of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, or those of the investment firm Blockchain Capital. And although industry specialists, traders and analysts can put emphasis on different things, what seems common to many of them is the belief that the market will mature and evolve in the future, strengthening, will see more developments and consolidations - and such a market will likely push out many weak or unreliable projects.
