According to CoinMarketCap, almost Twenty Thousand cryptocurrencies have come into existence since the industry began.

But how many of these are zombie projects, utterly forgotten by both creators and diamond-handers, stumbling around the sad, forgotten darkness of the interwebs?  A site called Ninety-Nine Bitcoins Dot Com, keeps a running list of Dead Coins, estimating there are Seventeen-Hundred-And-Five dead projects.

I personally think this is a giant underestimation.  Most of the near Twenty-Thousand projects are dead in the water.  And today, we’re giving a few a proper remembrance.  That’s right, we’re talking about Dead Coins. It’s important to remember that all assets aren’t equal and that as a result of bear markets, a lot of the underbrush is cleared out of the crypto forests, letting the projects with good roots, flourish in the next bull run. The goal is to NOT fall for the hype, just like so many did for the project I’m going to cover.

Some of these projects had meteoric rises to the top with relative wide-spread adoption across the crypto community so their falls from grace were pretty surprising and devastating, sometimes even crashing the price of Bitcoin along with them.  While other dying coins were more obvious Ponzi schemes and scams.  Here’s lookin’ at you BNB meme coins…  So let’s get into it…

What’s in a name…?  Well, Namecoin is a name you don’t hear very often anymore…  It was one of the original altcoins.  Back when CoinMarketCap launched in Twenty-Thirteen, it was number three.  Namecoin attempted to provide a decentralized domain name service and allowed users to register various parts of their identity like email or Bitcoin address.  Its domains were much more secure, and couldn’t be seized or censored.  However, most felt Namecoin wasn’t very user friendly since the domains were really only viewable on Linux systems.

And back in Twenty-Fifteen, it came out that there were only Twenty-Eight active domains out of the Hundred-And-Twenty-Thousand that had been registered.  In the Twenty-Thirteen bull run, Namecoin reached a market cap of One-Hundred-Million dropping significantly during the crypto winter, but spiking up to One-Hundred-Thirty-Three Million in the Twenty-Seventeen bull market.  Now it has very weak trading volume and a market cap of Ten Million.  The team’s still active so you never know if this one will rise from the dead. But it’s not a moniker I’d want on my portfolio.

One Coin to rule them all, One Coin to find them.  One Coin to bring them all and in the darkness–  NOPE.  Actually, One Coin didn’t work out too well for anyone involved.  One Coin was founded by the self-appointed crypto queen, Ruja Ignatova,  and touted itself as the Bitcoin killer.  Later identified as a Ponzi scheme, One Coin pulled in Four Billion dollars between Twenty-Fourteen and Twenty-Sixteen.

Ignatova claimed One Coin could be mined and used for payment, but there wasn’t actually a One Chain blockchain or payment system.  They also sold courses on crypto and investing (most of which was supposedly plagiarized), incentivizing people to bring in more participants.  Basically, it was a pyramid scheme, and you could only cash out if you bought a certain level of the education packages because it wasn’t actively traded on major exchanges, just the OneCoin website.  The website shut down in Twenty-Seventeen, and with it, went all hopes of investors making a profit.

And when various governments became suspicious, Ignatova just disappeared, leaving her brother and cofounder to run the company.  They were both arrested in November Twenty-Nineteen.  And Ruja Ignatova’s brother finally took a plea deal, promising to inform on his sister and OneCoin’s other conspirators, that supposedly had links to the Bulgarian mafia!  Wild.  Sounds like he’ll be in need of some witness protection…

Bitconnect was released in Twenty-Sixteen, allowing users to exchange Bitcoin for the BCC token and receive an insanely high yield of One Percent compounded daily interest.  The price of BCC rose from its ICO price of Seventeen cents to an all-time high of Four-Hundred-Sixty-Three dollars, spending time in the top Twenty coins.  But everything came crashing down, when the UK government sent Bitconnect an order to prove its legitimacy in November of Twenty-Seventeen.  And the great state of Texas followed suit in January Twenty-Eighteen, issuing Bitconnect a cease and desist letter that claimed the company was a Ponzi Scheme.  Bitconnect shut down a few days later, and the price crashed Ninety-Two percent.  There was an attempt to freeze Bitconnect’s assets, but we’re still not sure if the company ever actually existed so that didn’t really work out…  Bitconnect did refund the loans in BCC, but the internal exchange price and liquidity collapsed, and the coin went to zero.

The SEC sued Bitconnect, its Indian founder, Satishkumar Kumbhani,  and the American national promoter, Glenn Arcaro; estimating they defrauded Two Billion from U.S. investors.  Arcaro pleaded guilty at the end of Twenty-Twenty-One, but the Department of Justice is still trying to locate the Indian founder, who seems to have disappeared into thin air.  Maybe he and Ruja Ignatova are hiding out on a yacht somewhere together…

Some other notable crypto fails include

-Storeum, which promised users storefronts on its digital marketplace, almost like an early metaverse project, but was poorly organized and basically had no roadmap.

-The 0xBitcoin team left the project when it crashed from Five Dollars to Ten cents.

-Aeron plummeted Ninety Percent when it was delisted from Binance, and the team minted a ton more tokens, only to negatively impact the price even more…  They responded by blocking anyone on social media who questioned them…

These are just a few of the thousands of coins that now live six feet under in the crypto graveyard…

And during the height of the bull run, back in April and May of Twenty-Twenty-One, the meme coin craze reached full mania.

Doge was founded in December of Twenty-Thirteen, likely to profit off of the trend started by the long dead Feathercoin, but it really didn’t gain traction until people started buying it as a joke in the winter of Twenty-Twenty.

And when Elon Musk began tweeting about it, it made a lot of millionaires, seemingly overnight.  In an attempt to make quick profits, everyone started putting out Doge copycats like Shiba Inu.  Shib had massive gains, but crashed hard as soon as the markets started to get rattled.

And then there were the copycats of the copycats: Floki Inu, Dogelon, ShibaPup.  It seemed like there was a new meme coin every day, each with a more ridiculous name than the last.  And when the market felt oversaturated with dog coins, the trend moved to the even more absurd and vulgar.  There was a coin called Australian Safe Shepherd.  We’re a family friendly show so I’ll let you spell out that coin’s abbreviation, but the memes moved to all kinds of body parts and swear words.  Anything to get the attention of the twitterverse or Reddit subpages.

A lot of these coins had their moment in the sun as they shot up towards the moon (sometimes for less than Twenty-Four hours), only to come crashing back down to earth when everyone cashed out and dumped on investors too slow or too diamond-handy to get out in time.  The meme coin gambling frenzy was escalated by the fact that most of the coins were on the BNB chain.  With such low transaction fees, there was almost no risk to put a hundred bucks or so into a coin, with the hopes it would Ten-X in a day.

There were coins like Squid Game and Safemoon that capitalized on other cultural touchstones.

When SQUID skyrocketed from mere cents to almost Three Thousand dollars, the founders rug-pulled, collecting Three-Point-Four million dollars from their investors.  The team announced on their telegram that they were abandoning the project because they were “depressed from the scammers” and “overwhelmed with stress,” subsequently deleting their white paper and website.

Similarly, Safemoon was pumped by all sorts of celebrities back in Twenty-Twenty-One, finally reaching its peak last January.  But since then, it has crashed Eighty-Five Percent.  When the coin started crashing, Safemoon tried to convince its investors it would bring “a combination of multiple innovations combined into a single SafeMoon ecosystem.”  Whatever that means…  It wanted to bring a bunch of wind turbines to single households, including in Africa, stealing a page out of the Cardano book by saying it was going to serve the “unbanked.”

No one really knows how the wind turbines will benefit the company or investors, and the company promises to release its own exchange.  But any positive news, is overshadowed by all the lawsuits people have thrown at Safemoon for “misleading promotions and celebrity endorsements.”  Many in the team have left the project, and investors suspect the team cashed out a while ago.

But because these meme coins were so frenzied and fast-paced, few investors actually took the time to research the teams behind the projects.  Most of these s-coins were basically Ponzi schemes.  And unfortunately, as with any addictive activity, meme coin traders didn’t stop when they should have.  They got greedy, caught up in the euphoria.  And a lot of people put in more money than they were willing to lose.  Finbold estimates Scammers rug-pulled almost Three Billion dollars last year.  Seven Million dollars per day.

Many blame the irresponsible and scammy meme coin trend as part of the reason for the May Twenty-Twenty-One crash.

The lesson here is two fold. ONE – Not all coins stick around, Even if they appear to have good fundamentals. That’s why my long term crypto holds are reserved for Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and Cardano. They have been around for a while and have had consistent development and partnerships made over the years. There is no room in crypto for rose colored glasses and you CANT just put money into a coin and forget it.

Lesson two – Flashy crypto trends are VERY high risk and you should NEVER put money into a project you haven’t fully vetted. Only a lucky few get rich quick, the rest get broke quicker.  Make sure you have good risk management, and only invest what you’re comfortable losing.  Please don’t be like that Squid Game investor who lost his life savings on a memecoin literally made about a TV show.  But if this video can teach us anything, it’s that there is a risk to any investment, no matter how stable the project seems.  We saw that recently with Luna.  Please be careful, guys.
That’s all I got. Be Blessed. Bitboy out.  Bitboy out.