The Bitcoin came to be worth $ 20,000 in December. Since then it has lost 70% of its value between theft and crossings with regulators, but it is still the most popular cryptocurrency in the world. The real drama is the more than 800 digital coins that died along the way.
Dead Coins is a website dedicated to listing all the cryptocurrencies that are worth less than 1 cent. The complete list includes 828 coins, of which 636 were serious but did not materialize, 125 were scams, 55 were conceived as a joke and 12 ended up hacked.
This extensive list of "dead criptodivisas" illustrates well the explosion of ICOs of the last 18 months that the CNBC compares with the dotcom bubble of 2000. An ICO (Initial Offer of Coins) is a process in which a company emits its own currency to finance a blockchain-based project. Investors do not get a share in the capital of the company, but cryptocurrencies that can be used in a given product.
Some investors participate in ICOs because they believe in the project, but in general these "digital IPOs" work because the newly created cryptocurrencies are very cheap and can produce large profits if their value increases. In the last 18 months there has been a great explosion of ICOs. CoinSchedule estimates that in 2017 companies raised $ 3.8 billion through them. So far in 2018, that figure has skyrocketed to 11,900 million dollars.
However, the ICOs are very risky investments in which hundreds of projects do not reach a good port and many others are directly fraud, as shown by the Dead Coins list. In a world in crisis for the loss of value of Bitcoin, the result is more than 800 dead cryptocurrency.