Squid Games, Tesla Coin: Famous Crypto Coins that are Dead Now

Highlights

• Dead coins have been stopped midway due to various reasons, like lack of liquidity, few of them being alledged scams or project owners pulling out.
• According to Coinospy and Deadcoins, the website that tracks deceased crypto projects, close to more than 1,600 tokens are deemed dead to date.
• Market participants must do their due diligence before investing in the crypto space. 

The cryptocurrency market has grown at a rate of knots over the past decade. All projects were not a success. Several notable projects grabbed prominent eyeballs and lured several market participants onto its platform but soon became dead, swallowing the money invested by the investors. A few were stopped mid-way due to lack of liquidity, while many were deemed scams. The list is a long one. According to Coinospy and Deadcoins, the website that tracks deceased crypto projects, close to more than 1,600 tokens are deemed dead to date.

Let’s look into some of the coins that created initial buzz but died in mere months.

Squid Games Token

The Squid Games climbed the popularity charts as one of the tokens with colossal potential. The Squid Games token was launched on 28 October 2021 and immediately saw an astronomical rise of 1,250%. Established as a play-to-earn game on the Binance Smart Chain platform, it was named after the popular Netflix series Squid Games. 

Also read: Why is SPELL crypto gaining traction today?

The Squid Games whitepaper suggested that there would be a presale of the tokens in Phase Two, starting with the token airdrop. By the initial months of 2022, the Squid Game team wanted the token price to touch US$50. However, that's when the project hit murky waters and died as it was alleged as a “scam token”. 

Several market participants complained that investors could not sell their tokens on the DEX platform PancakeSwap. When the token collapsed, it made up more than US$2 million of investors' money, with the price of the token priced at US$2,800. The coin’s entire digital presence, i.e. the website, whitepaper, social media accounts, disappeared overnight. 

Famous Crypto Coins That Are Dead Now: Squid Games, Tesla Coin

BitConnect token 

Another popular token that received decent traction was the BitConnect crypto. BCC was another big Ponzi scheme that promised users to receive high yields in return with the ticker. BCC offered a platform to trade Bitcoin was launched in 2016. The token hit an all-time high of US$463 in December 2017 and was reduced to as low as US$0.40 by 11 March 2019. 

BitConnect made merry on the aggressive marketing, which promoted it as high yield-returning crypto, and its rise coincided with the rise of bitcoin. In 2018, the Texas and North Carolina regulators had deemed the token a scam, and its price took a dip soon.

Also read: What are Coin Mixers? Are they illegal?

Just like the Squid Games, the US Securities and Exchange Commission had alleged that Bitconnect had defrauded US investors of US$2 billion in total before shutting its shop. 

Tesla Coin 

This was another prominent crypto token that lured many innocent investors onto its platform under the impression that it was launched by Tesla boss Elon Musk. But later it surfaced that Musk had nothing to do with the launch or the promotion of the fake token. 

Tesla Coin was launched as crypto with an e-wallet management system, which allows investors to trade in multiple cryptos. Launched in 2010, the token was a big hit at that time, and it was believed that this particular token was backed by Tesla and was being developed in partnership with the US government. 

But the mysterious part was its owner is still anonymous. In fact, according to a Federal Trade Commission report, more than 7,000 investors had lost US$80 million in various crypto scams so far. Although the exact amount of money that the investors lost through Tesla Coin is still unknown, it is believed that approximately millions had gone down the drains. 

OneCoin

Launched in 2014, the OneCoin was another Ponzi scheme launched by the self-proclaimed Crypto Queen Ruja Ignatova. The Bulgarian crypto enthusiast had claimed One Coin as the Bitcoin Killer and said that through OneCoin, an investor can mine tokens, and it boasted of a total supply of 120 billion OneCoin coins. 

However, OneCoin was not based on a blockchain model or didn't have its own payment mechanism. The backend team pumped the prices of the tokens. But neither it was traded on any platform, nor did it have any utility value. It is believed that investors lost close to US$ $4 billion between 2014 and 2016. 

With advancements in technology and online scams, it's a bit challenging to predict which token can be a scam in the future and which might turn out to be a dead token. A little due diligence can help the investors from investing in such scams or fake tokens. Most scams promise guaranteed returns, but it's important to note that cryptos are a highly volatile and speculative market, and their prices can change at any given point in time. So, make sure you do proper research before making any investment decisions.

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