Coingecko Removes Half of Its Projects

Coingecko has removed thousands of cryptocurrencies from its platform.

Coingecko has removed thousands of cryptocurrencies from its platform.

Projects come and go, and on platforms like Coingecko or CoinMarketCap only ticker symbols remain as a reminder that the projects are long gone. The gap between the two biggest aggregators couldn’t be bigger: Coingecko lists 12,000 cryptocurrencies, CoinMarketCap two million. According to Coingecko, it has now cleaned up half of all tokens. This could be the reason for the large differences.

Spring cleaning on Coingecko

There’s a high death rate in the crypto market. Since 2014, Coingecko has listed more than 24,000 cryptocurrencies, and not even half of them have survived. More than 14,000 tokens are now "dead" — with no trading activity, turned out to be scams, or were scrapped by the project teams.

"Most dead cryptocurrencies come from projects launched between 2020 and 2021," Coingecko explains. Many cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum hit record highs. Coingecko also attributes the high number of inactive coins between 2020 and 2021 to the easy token issuance and the rising popularity of memecoins. In total, 7,530 cryptocurrencies were listed during the gold rush period, which have since been cancelled.

While white papers, developers, blockchain, and use cases were needed in the early days, token generators, Twitter accounts, and ChatGPT are enough nowadays. This saves time and money, but the tokens churned out often have low survival odds. Many memecoin projects start "without a product," says Coingecko, "most are abandoned after a short time". Coingecko explains that tokens are evaluated based on a number of criteria, such as "liquidity, team presence, and project maturity".