This year wasn’t as a good for the cryptocurrency space as 2017, at least when it comes to prices. While last year bitcoin, the flagship cryptocurrency jumped from $1,000 to a near $20,000 all-time high, this year it came back down to a little under $3,200 before recovering.
Most altcoins followed along and crashed – some so severely they went down over 90% from their all-time highs, like Ethereum’s ether. Some lesser known ones, however, ended up dying out as the bear market took its toll on some projects.
There are various reasons for a cryptocurrency to end up disappearing. Altcoins are relatively easy to create, which means some were mere parodies, outright scams, or ended up not being good enough to survive. Some even fell prey to hackers that ruined their blockchains. Websites like DeadCoins list all the projects that have gone down, now estimated to be over 800.
Here are some of the most well-known tokens that went down to the 2018 bear market, and are likely not making it back.
1 – BitConnect Coin
BitConnect was widely believed to be a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme last year, as investors managed to earn 1% a day on their investments thanks to what the team behind the project claimed to a be a trading bot.
Various community members tried to warn others BitConnect didn’t look sustainable, and earlier this year the platform finally collapsed after being hit with cease and desist letters from regulators in the US, and amid what it claimed to be attacks on its platform.
After the platform went down, the BCC token crashed form an over $400 high to a little under $10 in a few days, to then keep on going down on the few not-so-popular exchanges that still listed the token. In August of this year, the coin was removed from Trade Satoshi, the last exchange trading it. Since its demise, lawsuits against promoters have been widely reported.
2 – FitCoin
FitCoin was an ERC-20 token launched last year that was supposed to be the cryptocurrency that would be used on a free credit card service that was supposed to work with various currencies, while only charging a 1% transfer fee.
The team behind it claimed it was going to be possible to use the card on every merchant that accepted cards, and was set to launch mobile apps to help users keep track of their balances. The coin is now listed as dead, as its website is down, and its social media accounts have been deleted.
3 – Pincoin
Pincoin, unlike FitCoin, didn’t go down because of a lack of development or interest, but because it was one of the largest initial coin offering (ICO) scams in history. The project raised a total of $660 million from 32,000 investors, only to dupe them out at the end.
“Vietnamese cryptocurrency company Modern Tech disappears with $660M raised in an ICO for its Pincoin token, pulling off one of the biggest exit scams <— raro que nadie de mis amigos cripto lo haya tuiteado :P
— Mariano Amartino (@amartino) April 14, 2018
The company reportedly promised investors a 40% return on their investments per month, while claiming to be overseen by the PIN Foundation. It even rewarded investors for bringing in other investors, to get to as many people as possible. After raising their capital, the team behind the project merely disappeared.
4 – Titanium
Titanium is a cryptocurrency that ended up going down after the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) got involved in its ICO. Per the chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s Cyber Unit, Robert Cohen, Titanium’s ICO was based on “a social media marketing blitz that allegedly deceived investors with purely fictional claims.”
According to charges filed against the company, it lied about supposed business relationships it had with the US Federal Reserve and various large organizations, including PayPal, Verizon, and The Walt Disney Company. Its ICO ended up being shut down before it finished as regulators jumped in to protect investors.
5 – LottoCoin
LottoCoin (LOT) is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies that ended up dying out this year. The cryptocurrency was launched back in 2013, but this year its social media presence went under, and it stopped being traded on most cryptocurrency exchanges.
According to available data its website is notably still up and it was built on its own blockchain. It’s unclear who created the cryptocurrency. While it is still possible to buy and sell LOT on Cryptopia, its 24-hour trading volume ion the LOT/LTC pair – the only one that’s available for LottoCoin – was of about $20.
Going Forward
The cryptocurrencies listed above are merely examples of some of the hundreds of coins that died out this year because of the bear market. Among them were various scams, failed ICOs, and projects that went nowhere after going live.
Despite these failures, top cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Ethereum’s ether are still going strong. As CryptoGlobe recently covered bitcoin’s second-layer scaling solution, the Lightning Network, has kept on going throughout the bearish trend, and recently saw an artist sell artwork for a milisatoshi.
As for ether, according to Consensys, strong number shows that it isn’t going anywhere. Currently, 94% of decentralized applications (dApps) are deployed on the Ethereum platform, and it’s still processing around 15 million transactions a month.
The number of cryptocurrency ATMs has, in fact, doubled so far this year to 4,000. These machines support top cryptos like bitcoin, litecoin, ether, bitcoin cash, and privacy-centric coins like dash and monero.
