Bursting Bubble? Over 800 Cryptocurrencies Are Now Worthless as Bitcoin Falls by 70% From Its Peak
In the heyday of bitcoin over the past year, many enterprising groups have launched cryptocurrency tokens of their own, supported by the ever increasing amount of money being poured into crypto assets at the time. Now, over 800 of these coins are now dead, their values having dropped to less than one cent.
At its peak, the value of bitcoin was on the brink of going past the $20,000 mark until sell-offs and regulation pressure combined to send the cryptocurrency to a downward spiral. The effect on the numerous digital tokens that has been launched was quickly evident, as over 800 of these new coins are now worthless, as CNBC pointed out.
Despite a staggering $11.9 billion so far in 2018 that has been poured into these cryptocurrency projects via initial coin offerings, or ICOs, the value of these newly minted digital tokens are still tied to bitcoin to varying extents. When there was an explosion of the value of bitcoin, the number of new tokens and ICOs blew up as well.
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The reverse holds true as well, however, and with bitcoin now in the $6,000 range, other, less valuable crypto tokens have seen their value drop to virtually nothing.
The situation does not look to be improving anytime soon. The value of bitcoin, which still has the largest market capitalization out of all digital tokens in existence today, has seen its value drop off by around 70 percent of its record high in 2017.
It's this graveyard of "dead" cryptocurrencies that Bloomberg has compared to the dotcom bubble in the U.S. during the early 2000s. From the thousands of ICOs that have flooded the market especially last year, less than four percent of them went on to keep a market cap of more than $50 million and exhibit actual growth, according to ICO advisory firm Satis Group.
