#Gate广场四月发帖挑战

The Most Failed Projects in Cryptocurrency History

In the crypto world, there are usually two kinds of “failures”: one is a spectacular large-scale scam (swallowing up huge amounts of funds), and the other is a silent large-scale death (with an extremely large number). Overall, this is a brutal hellscape where only one in nine survives.

 

1. Macro Data: A Battlefield of Life and Death

If you randomly invest in a cryptocurrency project, the probability that it will fail is extremely high.

Overall death rate: According to industry statistics, since 2021, among nearly 7 million recorded crypto projects, more than half (about 3.6 million) have ceased trading, with a failure rate as high as over 52%. Just in the first quarter of 2025 alone, about 1.8 million projects “died.”

Death rate of VC-funded projects: Even “mainstream” projects that received venture capital still saw nearly 45% shut down between 2023 and 2024, and most of them had monthly revenue of less than $1,000.

GameFi sector death rate: Blockchain gaming projects have the most disastrous failure rate, reaching 93%, with an average lifespan of only 4 months.

2. Epic Failures Ranked by “Loss Amount”

These projects didn’t just fail—they also caused losses on an astronomical scale, leaving major scars on crypto history.

OneCoin: One of the world’s largest crypto pyramid schemes, with absolutely no blockchain technology support—purely raising funds by recruiting people to join, siphoning off about $4 billion. Its founder has been arrested and sentenced to severe prison terms.

BitConnect: A classic Ponzi scheme that once promised the absurd return of “1% daily interest.” After it was shut down abruptly in 2018, the price of its token BCC, which was near $500, instantly went to zero, causing investors to lose about $2 billion.

PlusToken: China’s largest crypto Ponzi scheme, luring victims with high rebates as bait. In the end, the operators fled with the money, with the amount involved reaching as much as $2 billion.

Thodex: A centralized exchange in Turkey. In 2021, after its founder ran off with users’ assets, it caused losses of about $2.6 billion.

Mt. Gox: One of the earliest Bitcoin exchange giants. After going bankrupt due to a large-scale hacker attack, about 850,000 Bitcoins (worth about $4.5 billion at the time) were lost, becoming the most famous security disaster in the crypto world.

3. Classic Zeroing Cases Ranked by “Drop/Fraud”

These tokens once looked promising, but ultimately their value evaporated by more than 99%, or they were directly proven to be scams.

ICP: Once hailed as a “Ethereum killer,” this star project launched at nearly $700 in 2021, then crashed all the way down to long-term single-digit dollars. The drop exceeded 99%, making it a typical case of “high opening, low closing, and valuation collapsing.”

MXCC: In 2018, it carried out one of the “fastest harvests in history.” From token issuance to running off took only about 6 weeks. It siphoned off about 5 billion RMB from domestic investors, and then quickly went to zero.

SQUID: A Meme coin released in 2021 to ride the popularity of Netflix’s hit series “Squid Game.” After the price was pumped up to a high point, the developers suddenly withdrew the funds from the liquidity pool and ran off. Within minutes, the price crashed to zero—a textbook “rug pull” scam.

EDT: The platform token of the early decentralized exchange “Yide.” Due to internal team conflict, technical issues, and the price being broken downward, the price fell from its peak and ultimately went to zero, becoming a failed case in early DeFi exploration.

4. How to Identify Warning Signs Before a “Failure”

By combining observations of a project’s fundamentals, you can spot some common “death signals”:

Liquidity drying up: On decentralized exchanges, the token’s trading pool becomes extremely shallow, and buy/sell slippage is huge (for example, exceeding 20%), meaning there is almost no real trading depth left.

Community zombification: In a project’s official Telegram or Discord groups, only ad bots remain spamming. Real user discussions and developer interactions have completely stopped.

Development stagnation and team going missing: The project’s code repository (such as GitHub) has not been updated for a long time. Core team members’ social media accounts stop posting. They no longer respond to any questions.