112  Blockchain

Dead coins

As the name suggests, dead coins are the coins that have been abandoned,

used as a scam by fraudsters, the project website is down or has various

technical issues such as

• wallet issues

• no social media updates

• no real project development as developers ran out of funding or

walked away from the project

• low volume of coins

There are various types of dead coins. Many websites track the dead

coins through community assistance. One of the websites is https://www.

coinopsy.com/dead-coins/

• ICO dead coins: ICO dead coins are the ones raised through ICO.

They are high-risk and reward types of coins, whereby you can earn a

substantial amount of money if the ICO is successful, as well as if the

project behind it, goes live. However, as per the statistics from coinspy

(https://www.coinopsy.com/dead-coins/), over 60% of the ICO end

up as dead coins, before they are listed on the exchange to enable

trading of their coins.

• Joke dead coins: Joke coins are types of coins launched as a joke.

About 90%–95% of joke coins end up dead so you need to be careful

and do your research before investing in joke coins.

• Scam dead coins: There are lots of ICO that launched the coins to

raise money as a scam. They do not have a real project behind them,

and they usually end up as dead coins. You as an investor need to be

really careful before investing in these types of ICO.

• Abandoned dead coins: Abandoned coins are the ones where the proj-

ect has halted without any communication or social media update,

and the project website is dead. This classification is a default bucket

to capture any coins or tokens that do not belong to the other three

categories listed above (Figure 4.3).

The following is a list of some of the dead coins listed as a scam. The full

list can be searched at https://www.coinopsy.com/dead-coins/

Avoid ICO fraud and investment

As discussed in the above sections, a large portion of the ICOs are either

scams or fail due to multiple reasons including failure to raise the minimum

amount of investments through coins. We will go through types of past