According to Coinopsy, dead coins refer to “cryptocurrencies that have been abandoned, used as a scam, their website is down, has no nodes, has wallet issues, doesn’t have social updates, has low volume or developers have walked away from the project.”
Coinopsy’s list of dead crypto coins has 2,338 entries at the moment of writing this article, and the number keeps increasing every day. The website classifies dead coins into different types: ICO, joke, scam, and abandoned. Some of the cryptocurrencies enumerated are still listed on certain exchange platforms, although with very low prices.
- ICO Dead Coins: the name stands for Initial Coin Offerings. These are tokens with high risk/high reward and, according to Coinopsy over 60% end up dead coins before they even get an exchange or reach their first birthday. Some examples are Sether, Ulink Finance and EVEO.
- Joke Dead Coins: regarding this type of dead coins, the website advises: “An accurate guess is that over 90-95% of joke coins end up dead, so before you invest in a joke coin make sure it is not a joke or, if it is a joke, at least make sure it has some top developers.” CakeZilla, HoboNickels and Nyancoin fall into this category.
- Scam Dead Coins: Scams are really common, and they are usually targeted at obtaining private information (like security codes or some other data that gives them access to a digital wallet) or tricking someone into sending cryptocurrency to a compromised digital wallet. One of the most recent scams has been that of the digital token inspired by the popular South Korean Netflix series Squid Game, but there are many others.
- Abandoned Dead Coins: these are the most common, since when there is not much information about the reason why a token is dead, then it falls into the default abandoned classification. Between them you can find CorgiCoin, Bitgem and PizzaCoin.
