But there is always the afterlife.
A new breed of crypto undertaker sees this as an opportunity. Startup CoinJanitor has partnered with Dead Coins, saying it wants to help investors and developers recycle failed coins with market caps of under $50,000.
"We take as many coins off the market as possible," CoinJanitor Chief Executive Officer Marc Kenigsberg said. “Every time we absorb a project, we have more audience and more marketing reach. Instead of linear growth, we should hit some kind of hockey stick growth. All the tokens we get we destroy, we actually burn them. Turn off the entire blockchain."
CoinJanitor plans to take over dead projects, and to burn the dead coins. To do so, it’s created its own token.
"Last year, there were many instances where a project that was essentially ‘dead’ was picked up by a developer, who might have been passively mining it, and brought back to life," Lucas Nuzzi, director of technology research at Digital Asset Research, said in an email. "Out of nowhere, a new version would then come out and the price appreciated, regardless of the substance of the changes made by the developer. This has not happened frequently this year, and it’s hard to discern what are valid inflows versus potential spoofs."
Alas, most of the dead coins remain in the grave.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.