Dead Coins on Crypto Exchanges

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Last time we had analyzed more than 2000 projects and found that 640 currency did not publish a single line of code in 2019.

This week we broaden our dataset and analyzed 3162 projects (with 37936 Github repositories) and found 1240 dead crypto projects.

Dead project/coin/cryptocurrency — We define a dead project/coin/cryptocurrency that did not publish a single line of code in the last 90 days or more.

The interesting part of this analysis is that we wanted to showcase that exchanges are not doing due diligence and exposing harmful projects to their customers.

We analyzed more than 300 exchanges to find out how many dead coins a crypto exchange currently listing. We call this toxicity metrics:

Exchange Toxicity metrics — Total dead coins on exchange / Total coins on exchange

Exchanges with most Dead Cryptocurrencies

We found that 7 exchanges have listed more than 100 dead cryptocurrencies and CREX24 is at the top with listing 179 dead crypto projects.

IDEX one of the top DEX (Decentralized Exchange) has listed 763 cryptocurrencies, in which 158 are dead projects.

Most Toxic Exchanges

We found that CryptoBridge has 141 dead coins out of 334 total listed cryptocurrencies on the exchange. Token.store listed only 36 cryptocurrencies in which 15 are dead coins. This only shows the ignorance on the part of these exchanges.

Famous Centralized Exchanges (CEX)

Let’s look into some famous exchanges and their listings. Coinbase Pro is one of the best exchange which has 0 dead coins listed out 24 total listed Cryptocurrencies.

Some of these exchanges like Binance has their research wing, it is really surprising that they do not look in development metrics more deeply and follow up with these projects to understand their development.

Binance has 11 dead projects listed and Bitfinex has 7 dead projects listed.

Famous Decentralized Exchange (DEX)

Now let’s look into some famous DEX listings. We understand that DEX may be more open in terms of listing different types of projects. As you can see that IDEX listed 763 coins which make IDEX, one of the largest exchange in terms of token availability but because of this a huge number of dead coins can also be found on IDEX.

Binance DEX is a decentralized exchange created by Binance which has listed 155 coins in which 8 are dead coins.

Bitfinex also created a decentralized exchange Ethfinex (now Deversifi), which lists 148 coins.

Conclusion

We believe, Exchanges have a fiduciary duty to keep their customers informed about all the aspects of different coins listed on their exchanges. But the lack of regulatory scrutiny and greed for earning more money by listing projects are exposing normal crypto investors to such harmful projects.

Trust us, Don’t verify

While doing our analysis, we reached out to some projects to find out their open-source Github. Most of the time we got the reply that “We are not open source“. This is very problematic and goes against the ethos of “Don’t trust, Verify”.

After raising millions of dollars from the public these projects now behave like private companies, most of the time without a product or open-source development. There is no good reason not to open source your technology or the part of your technology. Having thousands of people in telegram groups talking about changing the world will not have any impact.

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.” — Linus Torvalds (Created Linux and Git)

The most prominent Cryptocurrencies/Tokens have their codebase open-sourced, so people can track their development.

So if you are invested in any crypto project, ask them to open source their codebase or the part of their codebase, so you can track their development.

Complete Data — You can access these metrics on CoinCodeCap.

About CoinCodeCap

CoinCodeCap analyzes the codebase of various cryptocurrencies. Anyone can showcase development activity on their platform using our APIs.

We also help in development audit reports for Cryptocurrencies. If you are a crypto project or a crypto exchange, you can reach us at [email protected].

If you like what we are doing, please subscribe to our newsletter and you can donate us too 😃.

BTC – 37JcqFze5eCKzyj5S7i2tE2uKi3THtsMXc

ETH – 0x9489210BBC83A78eD62C0De5F645B4573637F1BE

*We update market cap once in a week and use third party sources like Nomics and Coingecko for this purpose, so if you find market cap information inaccurate does not blame us. 😃

NOTE: We pulled listing data from Nomics and If you find any information inaccurate please email me at [email protected] or DM us @coincodecap on Twitter.