The bag holders deny the truth, but the crypto market has a harsh reality: 99% of altcoins will cease to exist within the next few years. Several of these utterly incompetent projects reached a billion dollar market cap, but that’s all history now.
Nic Carter, an acclaimed bitcoin analyst, spent some time investigating what the 2018 year was like for 15 altcoins, and comparing their fate with his predictions from the previous year.
The fact that I had written about two of them caught my attention. These are the two ultimate shills Electroneum (ETN ) and Verge. Check out MLMCompanies.org if you aren’t sure of how to weather the altcoin storm.
According to Nic’s method, Verge has been declared dead while Electroneum remains on life support. Give it another year, and ETN will be gone too.
Nic said this about XVG.
Verge
Verge was/is a privacy coin that relied on Tor to be bolted on top of Bitcoin, rather than enhancing privacy on the blockchain. The #VergeFam was very active on Twitter and Reddit in the past, but has been quiet recently. Verge’s development and social media activities were all but stopped when 51% repeatedly attacked in the early part of this year. Its five-hash functionProof of Work algorithm was the culprit, as it made it much more vulnerable.
The attacks were not small ones either.
It’s been a while since has seen any commits on its official github. It looks like there isn’t much activity. (There may be development happening somewhere else, but the official github doesn’t seem to have any commits.)
? Price Change: $0.00706 $0.16
Drawdown: 95.2%
Developer Status: Apparently inactive
Verge has been 51% destroyed.
Verdict: Verge has been exploited multiple times, and the developers were unable to protect the protocol from these attacks. The #VergeFam and developers have all but abandoned it.
Electroneum
Nic is surprised that the Electroneum “mobile mining marvel” is still moving, but it’s running on the fumes from its 2017 hype.
Electroneum, a fork from Monero that raised $39m during an ICO held in October 2017, is a fork. a posteriori nonsense like most ICOs. However, the team behind it (whose expertise lies in online marketing) was able to generate a lot of hype that led to the asset reaching a peak market capitalization of $900 million. One of my most vivid memories from the late 2017 crypto mania is sitting next to a young man who told me his favorite currency was Electroneum, because it could be mined on your smartphone. This was not mining but a proof-of-time concept, where you received units of ETN for simply having the ETN app open.
ETN’s hollowness is obvious. The article provides more information. This is a generic ICO fork of Monero, with little to distinguish it from other forks. It was created by a group with limited technical knowledge. There is some minimal development, but it’s happening at an extremely slow pace. It was fun to see the official forum host a Halloween costume contest with an Electroneum theme.
It’s not quite 95%, and there’s some development, so it’s a loss for me.
? Price Change: $0.0075 $0.08
Drawdown: 91.0%
If minimal, developer status is ongoing
Noteworthy event: In 2018, the ETN team forced every ICO to go through a KYC procedure.
Verdict: Electroneum has reached a state of purgatory, where the project is clearly a failure but it continues to sputter along until SEC reaches the bottom and demands that the team return all money.
