Read the latest report Dead coins on Crypto Exchanges.
This week, we have analyzed the development activity of more than 2000 cryptocurrencies. The aim was to find out crypto projects with no development activity.
Note — Data availability for currencies listed on different exchanges and their market cap was limited.
Source for exchanges and market cap data are Nomics and Coinpeprika, which might be different from CoinMarketCap data.
This means that below data points can be enhanced with more exchange and market cap information.
Main findings :
- More than 640 cryptocurrencies did not publish any code in 2019.
- Yobit is top exchange for these coins, list 62 such coins.
- The combined market cap of these cryptocurrencies is more than $415 million. (415,341,340)
- Proton Token with the highest market cap (84,989,086) has not published any code since 2018. (This data is from Nomics APIs)
Methodology — We fetched all the repository for cryptocurrencies and then fetched the commits and releases for all these repositories. We also took forked repo of these projects in account while doing our analysis. In this process, we have analyzed more than 16,000 repositories.
Analysis
As all these assets are manifested in their codebase. Tracking codebase activity becomes very important. Regular codebase activity shows the project’s commitment and it’s necessary to gain investor’s trust in the project.
We have analyzed more than 2000 cryptocurrencies and found that 640 assets did not commit a single line of code in 2019. Many of these assets have millions of dollar in market cap listed in multiple exchanges (Centralize and Decentralize exchanges).
Out of 640 currencies here is Year-wise categorization. Here year show when these projects last updated.
Let’s see some examples, Proton Token with more than $80 million in market cap didn’t push any code since last year. Here is Proton token’s Github.
Another coin BQTX has almost no code on their Github but has more than $45 million in market cap.
Other than these assets we also have Scam coin list on our CoinCodeCap website. If we also consider them, then the overall valuation will cross $1 billion.
Exchanges
Normal investors get exposed to these assets on different Exchanges but these Exchanges prioritizing their own interest and are not performing due diligence. Yobit and CoinExchange are top in listing these inactive assets. (Remember, we got exchanges only for 282 assets out of 640).
Most of these exchanges are not able to generate enough revenue from trading hence they charge a high fee for listing various coins. This behavior is toxic to the whole industry. As investors lose money, regulators will come after these exchanges and assets. A self-regulatory market will perform its fiduciary duty and will not expose customers to these harmful assets.
Conclusion
The Crypto landscape is full of lies and empty promises. To make this ecosystem better we need to weed out projects which are not fulfilling their promises made to investors.
Complete Data
Here is complete data. CoinCodeCap Inactive Coins Analysis. (There are multiple sheets in the Excel)
We will dig more and enrich this dataset to understand more about the different crypto project and their Github activity.
Note — As we used available Github source for a given cryptocurrency and didn’t manually check each of them. So if you found some information inaccurate please mail us at [email protected]
About CoinCodeCap
CoinCodeCap analyzes codebase of various cryptocurrencies. Anyone can showcase development activity on their platform using our APIs. We also help in development audit reports for Cryptocurrencies. You can reach us at [email protected].
