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# Cryptocurrency

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Faith Boluwatife

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Faith Boluwatife

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Alex Manea

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Top 10 Biggest Cryptos That Failed

Cryptocurrency has become one of the fastest rising assets in the past couple of years. The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of the web3 have encouraged the growth of digital currency at a fast rate. There are over 10,000 cryptocurrencies in the digital market that serve respective purposes like affordable loans, and some even aspire to replace dollars. With the vast amount of cryptos, it's no surprise how many cryptocurrencies have failed. The number ranks up to 2000 coins and they have faded away due to frauds, premature preparation, and many more. Luna is the latest name on the list.

What Happened to Luna? 

The most recent failed cryptocurrency is Luna. The values of stablecoins are usually linked with another asset to stabilize the price and Luna is supposed to be a stablecoin that was tied to Terra USD.

Unfortunately, this link brought down Luna as things took a turn for the worse when a large amount of TerraUSD was unexpectedly decoupled from the dollar, all due to a rumor that UST was changing the fixed interest rate to a variable rate. 

If one UST is minted, $1 of Luna is burned, and the same is true when Luna is minted, and USTs are destroyed. The stablecoin began to drop after a substantial amount of UST was dumped. 

This led to a frenzy among investors who began selling off their terra coins for other cryptocurrencies. This is one of the most shocking cryptocurrency failures as the value of Luna dropped from $20 billion to a little over zero in just a couple of days. Now, Luna is one of the many failed cryptocurrencies. 

Why Cryptos Fail

Many crypto coins have been launched in the market only to fade away and die after some time. 

Why do they keep failing? Many projects are bound to face challenges in a market that is still developing. 

Cryptocurrency creators have spent far too little time planning the business plan for their coins and tokens, only to discover after the launch that their concept is obsolete.

Many cryptocurrencies are simply copies of previously successful ones. Many of them aspired to achieve the same level of success as Bitcoin. However, Bitcoins are already on the market and are still in demand. This type of developer error will almost certainly continue.

Here are some reasons why we believe many cryptocurrencies fail:

  • Weak Ecosystem: Some cryptos focus on creating a coin and selling it without building a community that cares about their mission. 
  • Rug Pull: This happens when a founder of the team abandons a project, making away with the investments abruptly. It is fraudulent. 
  • Inactive Development: Some failed cryptocurrencies have this in common. Founders abandon some projects and do not try to keep them up with growing times. 
  • Security Issues: Breaches into cryptocurrency projects can also lead to their failures. From hacking to creating fake nodes, it's easy to bring down a coin when its security isn't strong.

Top 10 Cryptos That Failed

Here, we highlight some of the top cryptos that have failed or are no more existent on the market.

1. Zilliqa

Despite creating new projects in the crypto ecosystem, Zilliqa continues to drop even further. Its selling point is that Zilliqa is designed to complete thousands of transactions in a second and solve the problem of blockchain scalability.

Regardless, the cryptocurrency has failed as a result of market conditions and preferences. Despite its ability to make a comeback, it still makes this list of failed cryptocurrencies.

2. Dogecoin

What started as an internet joke became the largest memecoin on the internet. The cryptocurrency became popular due to its charitable nature and a large user base was established and it became a real coin to be used for exchanges. Unfortunately, the founder abruptly shut down the exchange and that was the end of this coin.

Elon Musk made a tweet where he said Dogecoin would be accepted as payment for Tesla products. Hopefully, there is a future for Dogecoin. 

3. SpaceBIT

Another on the list of failed cryptocurrencies is SpaceBIT. SpaceBIT is one that received a lot of attention in 2014 and looked like it was going to be a smashing success.

There was a lot of investment into making this coin and they had even launched nano-satellites as they wanted the digital currency to be accessible to all parts of the world.

There was adequate preparation for this cryptocurrency but sadly, it still failed. Nothing ever came out of this project and all news about SpaceBIT died after a while.

4. PayCoin

The founders, John Garza and GAW were knowledgeable miners and cryptocurrency experts and so the failure of PayCoin was quite renowned. 

What led to the death of this coin was that the digital currency was rushed and the security was compromised, all because they wanted to quickly build a huge user base.

5. GetGems

GetGems was another popular coin formed in 2014. It immediately went viral because it promoted electronic means of exchange. The success of this coin looked like it was going to be a sure thing as most consumers were excited about its launch.

Sadly, GetGems failed miserably and their popularity has dwindled into almost nothing. The founders were unable to fold up their promises and the importance of this cryptocurrency diminished.

6. Squid Game

Inspired by the popular South Korean Netflix series, the Squid Game token was launched and the tokens were to be used in a play-to-earn game that was supposed to be launched.

Like a typical rug pull scam, this coin started at the price of $0.04 on 27 October and had soared to $35 by 31 October. As the user base grew steadily, it soared to a peak of $2,856 on 1 November, and then the founders cashed out before it dropped to $0.002 on the same day.

7. Bogged Finance

Bogged Finance, decentralized finance (DeFi) suite lost its assets by almost 100% in 2021. Like some cryptocurrencies that have failed, the failure of this coin wasn't caused by fraudulent founders but by malicious attacks.

An unknown hacker had made away with over 15m Bogged Finance tokens by using a flash loan-based attack, stealing $3m of BOG's liquidity. This attack crashed BOG and although they made attempts to revive it, the coin has not gone beyond a $1 price.

8. Ekta

Ekta is a failed cryptocurrency that launched on the bases of connecting digital worlds by tokenizing actual goods. After launching in August, Ekta reached a high of $10.41 before plummeting to $0.15 following a malicious attack. The coin is currently suspended.

In 2021, someone with insider access to the Pancake Swap and bridge smart contracts hacked Ekta. The team has not revealed any further details regarding the incident just so they can tackle it themselves. However, they have stopped their trading in the meantime and hope to restart soon.

9. OneCoin

Ruja Ignatova, popularly known as the 'Bitcoin Killer' is the founder of the Ponzi scheme known as Onecoin.  Its poor organizational structure and previous scam attempts by the same company make this coin a Ponzi scheme and a dead cryptocurrency.

Ruja Ignatova vanished in 2017, and her brother, Konstantin Ignatov, stood in place for her.  Most of the leaders of Onecoin have since vanished or been jailed, with the exception of Ruja Ignatova who is nowhere to be found. Her brother Konstantin Ignatov pleaded guilty to money laundering and fraud charges in November 2019.

10. Ethereum's DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization)

The most anticipated cryptocurrency, DAO, collapsed tragically in a short period. It was introduced in 2016 by an experienced group of professionals, which made the growing consumer base confident.  Its popularity grew over time, and the investors who traded with it began to put their trust in DAO. 

Most cryptocurrency users had expected this medium of trade to emerge, therefore its emergence was not unexpected. When it was founded, it had a value of over $168 million. Unfortunately, it faded away in the crypto market after some time. Regardless, the impact of DAO was quite evident as most cryptocurrencies were launched around this time.

Faith Boluwatife

Author

Faith Boluwatife

Faith is an enthusiastic content writer with many years of experience in the finance, cryptocurrency, and forex space. She's a regular contributor for Sortter where she writes valuable pieces to improve knowledge. As a skilled writer, Faith has created content for diverse industries -- if it exists, she’s likely written about it!

Everything you find on Sortter is based on reliable data and unbiased information. We combine our 10+ years finance experience with readers feedback. Read more about our methodology

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