The Dead Coins Database records cryptocurrencies that stopped existing in any meaningful sense — and why. This page explains what's in it, what isn't, and how entries are verified.

What counts as "dead"

A coin enters the database when at least one of these holds:

  • The project ended it: exit scam, rug pull, or an announced shutdown.
  • The mechanism failed: the token's core design (a peg, a rebase, a mining scheme) collapsed irreversibly, even if a residual token still technically trades.
  • A hack killed it: an external exploit the project never recovered from.
  • The law ended it: regulators or courts shut the project down.
  • It wound down: an orderly, announced exit — a governance vote, a redemption, a foundation dissolving — where the team said what was happening and stopped.
  • It was abandoned: no development, no communication, no meaningful trading for an extended period.

Each entry records the cause (scam, rug-pull, hack, mechanism-failure, legal, wound-down, abandoned), the launch and death years, and a short factual note. Where a stable, reputable reference exists we link it; entries without a link still describe coverage in the note.

wound-down and abandoned are deliberately separate. Elixir's deUSD redeemed its holders 1:1 and said so; a chain whose team went quiet for three years did not. Both are dead, and lumping them together would flatter one and libel the other.

Two edge cases, decided explicitly

Coins that never existed count. Some entries — REcoin, Diamond Reserve Coin, Munchee — sold a token that regulators later established was never built. They are included because the question a reader brings ("what happened to this coin?") has the same answer either way, and the scam cause says exactly what happened. The death year is the year the project was stopped, and the note says the token never shipped rather than implying a working coin failed.

Renames and migrations don't count. A project that moved its holders to a new chain or ticker on announced terms didn't die — it moved, and counting that as a death would inflate the database with successions. BitcoinDark, whose holders were swapped into Komodo, is out for exactly this reason.

A price collapse is also not a death: a token trading at a thousandth of its peak with a live team and a working contract stays out, however grim the chart.

What the database is and isn't

This is a curated set of well-documented cases, selected for historical significance and verifiability — not an exhaustive census. Counts on the page describe THIS database, and the page says so ("N documented cases"), never "all dead coins ever". Estimates you may have seen elsewhere ("50%+ of all coins are dead") use looser criteria over larger listing sets; our headline stats are deliberately narrower and checkable entry by entry.

Entries are added by hand from public records, and the set grows with each review. If coverage criteria ever change — for example, a systematic re-scan against public listing data — the new criteria get documented on this page.

Change log

The count in a published citation should stay checkable after the database moves on. Every change to the set or its rules gets a dated entry here:

  • 2026-07-25 — three entries corrected after review; the count stays at 113 because all three were misfiled rather than wrong to include. Mango Markets re-dated from 2024 to 2025 and reclassified legal → wound-down: the SEC settlement did not end it, the DAO's own shutdown vote did, closing the exchange on 3 February 2025. Binance USD reclassified legal → wound-down; its peg held and Paxos still redeems 1:1, so the entry now says the supply drained through redemption rather than implying a collapse. Voyager Token reclassified legal → wound-down and re-sourced — the previous citation covered Voyager's liquidation without mentioning VGX at all.
  • 2026-07-17 — expanded from 32 to 113 documented cases; every entry now carries an evidence link.
  • 2026-07-12 — initial release with 32 documented cases.

Corrections

Every entry is public and attributable. If we got a fact wrong, tell us — Press & contact — and the correction ships with the next deploy.