Is Your Crypto DEAD (Here's How To Tell)

Hello and welcome to Coin Bureau's official podcast channel.

My name is Guy and if you're seeking unbiased in-depth information about Bitcoin,

cryptocurrencies, Web3, and all manner of related topics, then you've come to the right place.

I hope you enjoy today's episode.

Last year, 11.6 million cryptos went to zero. That's 32,000 tokens dying every day.

Yes, most of them were memes with a lifespan shorter than a carton of milk left out in the sun,

but plenty were sitting in portfolios bleeding slowly held by bag holders waiting for a recovery

that will never come. So how do you know if your bags are deceased or just taking a power nap?

And if it's the former, when do you finally pull the plug? My name is Guy and this is the Coin Bureau.

Before we begin though, nothing in this video is financial advice. I can't tell you what to buy

or sell and you can't outsource your decisions to YouTubers and expect to do well.

What I can tell you is how to check for vital signs, spot the difference between accumulation

and distribution, and come to terms with bag death. So if that sounds good, smash that like...

Let's dig in.

So, a new industry report has tallied the number of dead cryptos and good grief there are a lot.

According to CoinGecko, since 2021, more than half of all cryptos tracked on Gecko terminal have failed.

That means that if you picked a random altcoin, the odds of it going to zero were worse than a coin flip.

Now, I'm sure most of you knew this instinctively because clearly most cryptos aren't long for

this world. But last year was something else. 11.6 million cryptos wiped out. And to put that

into perspective, that means 86% of all crypto deaths in the last five years all concentrated in just

one year. And the closer you look, the more gruesome it gets. 7.7 million of those crypto deaths

happened in Q4 last year alone. So 35% of all the cryptos that died since 2021 died in the last

three months of 2025. Now, unless you've been in hibernation since Q3, you'll know what happened here.

The 10th of October last year saw the biggest liquidation event in crypto market history, wiping

$19 billion in leveraged positions off the map in a matter of hours. Thinly traded tokens with

shallow liquidity pools were vaporized instantly. And the market as a whole has been struggling

to find its footing ever since. However, the October massacre wasn't the beginning of crypto's

rolling mass extinction event. In 2024, pump.funds token launch pad industrialized the process of

launching a scam. And crypto hasn't been quite the same ever since. It used to take a team to pull

off a decent rug. You needed a website, a plagiarized white paper, maybe a fake LinkedIn profile for

your CTO. Now, it takes two minutes and the ability to prompt a meme generator. The barrier to entry

collapsed to near zero. And the floodgates duly opened. The total number of crypto projects

exploded from around 428,000 in 2021 to more than 20 million by the end of 2025. The tiny

minority of these that saw any significant trading volume mostly pumped on the back of influencer

shills and wash traded volume dumped at the first sign of non-insider wallets bidding and

muked irretrievably all within a few hours. Now, the vast majority of tokens launched in this way

are, by definition, meme coins as there is no project to speak of. The ticker and the chart

are the tokens raised on Dutch. You could argue that this is the altcoin in its most efficient form,

liberated from the window dressing and stripped down to its essence. And obviously, if you flood

the market with meme coins, you're going to see meme coins bear the brunt when liquidity dries up.

With no product development revenue model or likable meme to fall back on, these deaths are usually

foregone conclusions. Not all deaths look the same though, especially when you leave pump.fund

and go further down the effort curve. Some cryptos went to zero because the developer drained the

liquidity pool and pieced out. Others bled out slowly over months, their holders clinging to the

hope of a reversal that never came. And then there are the zombies, cryptos with billion dollar

market caps that still technically exist, still show up on trackers, but generate almost no activity

and have no path forward. Statistically speaking, most cryptos do eventually die and sooner rather

than later. Many are dead on arrival or have an extremely short lifespan, but not all. The question

for altcoin holders is then what type of body bag are you clinging on to. As we all know, a crypto

can technically exist forever on a blockchain. You might have had the same tokens sitting in your

wallet for years. The smart contract is still deployed on chain, immutable and permanent,

but existing is not quite the same thing as being alive and in crypto, the distance between the two

is measured in liquidity. There's no universally agreed standard or threshold for determining

when a crypto is dead, but that shouldn't mean it's hard for you to judge for yourself.

So we suggest starting with three simple criteria. Firstly, no trading activity for an extended period

of time. CoinGecko marks as inactive cryptos that haven't been traded a single time in 30 days.

This doesn't necessarily mean they can't be traded again and be reinstated as active,

but in reality it's safe to say that this is extremely rare. Zero trades in a day is a bad sign,

zero trades in a week is 99% dead and zero trades in a month is lost to history.

The trading volume flatline is usually the first sign. A coin or token that records zero volume

for days or even a few hours at a time is very likely receiving zero interest and has been abandoned.

If even the wash trading bots have moved on, it suggests there are not even any insiders left to

pull the strings and in snare exit liquidity. Without volume, there's no price discovery,

which means there's no realistic way to exit the position without nuking what's left of the value

yourself. Now, the second criteria is delisting, which is functionally somewhere between a death

sentence and a death certificate. When a major exchange removes a crypto, usually citing low

volume, weak development or regulatory concerns, it usually kills whatever liquidity remained.

And of course, if the crypto never even made it to a tier one exchange before being delisted

from a lower tier exchange, it doesn't bode well. It may still exist on some decks with $47

in the liquidity pool, but at that point the prospects of it staging a recovery for you to sell

in to aren't great. And third, there's the rug pool, which isn't so much a death as it is a

murder. In the first half of 2025 alone, losses from scams and rug pools exceeded $2 billion.

These are cryptos where the developer drained the entire liquidity pool overnight, often within

minutes of the initial pump and just walked away. The token still shows up in your wallet.

The contract is still on chain. It just has no extractable value left whatsoever.

Now, there is a tricky gray area in some cases where a crypto may appear dead when it is actually

in an accumulation phase. The chart could be down 90%, volume, anemic, social media gone quiet,

holders capitulated. That setup is either the last trickle of volume before the crypto goes to

absolute zero, or it's the exact moment before institutional players and sharp traders quietly

load up at the bottom while everyone else has given up. The difference between those two scenarios

is what every bag holders dreams are made of. But you might not be able to tell which one it is

just by looking at the price. Because it's not price but volume that should tell you whether

anyone still cares about a particular crypto. However, not all volume is created equal.

Crypto markets are absolutely rife with wash trading, where a single entity trades with itself

to create the illusion of activity. This is especially rampant on lower tier exchanges,

where there may be relatively little oversight and on decks where there's absolutely none.

So, a token showing high reported volume isn't a sign of life if that volume comes from the

same handful of wallets trading back and forth. In that case, you're looking at a low rate

manipulator trying to keep the lights on just long enough to find exit liquidity. The giveaway is

looking at unique wallet interactions versus total volume. If the numbers don't appear to make sense,

well, then they don't. Meanwhile, another useful and underused indicator is on balance volume.

Now, OBV tracks cumulative buying and selling pressure by adding volume on

updates and subtracting it on down days. If price is bleeding but OBV is rising or holding steady,

it suggests that there are bidders absorbing the capitulation. If OBV is flatlining alongside price

or worse declining faster than price, the token is being abandoned. You should also keep an eye

on liquidity depth. If market cap is a vanity metric, liquidity is a sanity metric.

A crypto can show a $100 million valuation on a tracker, but if there's only $50,000 sitting

in the liquidity pool, that number is meaningless. The 2% market depth metric measures how much capital

it takes to move the price by 2%. If a $5,000 sell order crashes the price, the market cap might as

well be written in crayon. It's ghost liquidity, a number that evaporates the moment someone tries

to realize it. A healthy project typically maintains liquidity at around 1% to 5% of its market cap.

Anything meaningfully below that and you're holding an asset, you can't sell without obliterating

your own position. Of course, there is the question of whether that liquidity is even safe.

Any good token screening tool will let you check if the liquidity pool tokens are locked.

If the developer holds 100% of the LP tokens and they're unlocked, well, the project is one

transaction away from vanishing. Locked liquidity at least means the developer can't drain

the pool on a whim, though it says nothing about whether the project has any actual future.

Meanwhile, developer activity is another vital sign worth checking if the crypto

purports to have some project associated with it. Cryptocurrencies are software protocols

and software requires maintenance. A GitHub repository with zero commits in the last six months

is therefore a ghost ship abandoned by the crew and drifting towards the rocks. But this metric

is low-hanging fruit for scammers who have adapted and will often fork active repositories

to make their project appear busy. Others make trivial updates, editing a readme file,

changing a comment in the code, just to generate commit activity on the chart.

That's why you can't just look at whether there are commits. You have to check what the devs

are actually doing on those commits. Are they fixing bugs, adding features, responding to issues,

or are they just rearranging the furniture to create the illusion of work? And being code

illiterate is no excuse in 2026. Run it by an LLM and it will tell you exactly what the devs

are cooking, or not. On that note, though, in the age of AI agent coding, GitHub activity is

likely going to become a less reliable indicator of project liveness, because even the most

low effort scams can now have fully functioning software products that are not vaporware

despite next to no human effort, time, or talent being invested. Now, at any rate, a

confluence of these signals matters more than any single one. If volume is dead, liquidity is drained

and GitHub shows no meaningful activity, the crypto is dead. But if price is down while volume

is quietly rising, liquidity is stable or growing, and developers, perhaps even human ones,

are still shipping code, well, that's another story. And by the way, if you're liking this

video, you'll love our weekly newsletter, where we break down the biggest stories in crypto each week.

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Now, not all dead cryptos look dead. Some have billion dollar market caps, active exchange listings,

and social media accounts still trundling along. Some have cults of bag holders who fight

tooth and nail to defend them, so we'd better not name many names. But many are nonetheless

zombie projects, technically alive, functionally irrelevant. They're not dead in the sense that

they've been delisted or rucked. The network still operate, but their valuations are held up by

the possibility of future adoption, which always seems to be just around the corner, but never

quite arrives. Indeed, Forbes named and shamed an entire category of so-called zombie blockchains

a few years back, much to crypto twitter's dismay. Chains that maintain massive valuations despite

generating almost no fees or revenue relative to their market caps. Many are still top 100,

top 50, even top 10 cryptos. The question for holders of these living dead cryptos is,

does any of this even matter? Well, we think it depends. The more obscure a project is,

the greater chance there is that it gets forgotten and does not recover during broader crypto

market rallies. Conversely, larger cap cryptos, projects that already have a critical mass of

name recognition, trading volume and liquidity are much more likely to join in such rallies,

regardless of their project fundamentals or functional zombie status. Here, we're getting close

to spilling over into a debate about fundamental versus technical analysis. That's maybe a topic

for another video, but we'll just emphasize here that market structure is ultimately king.

There is no reason to ignore a zombie project if its market structure flips bullish,

meaning that the chart prints a convincing series of higher lows and higher highs on high

timeframes. Likewise, there are no fundamentals or catalysts that are bullish enough to save an

asset with broken market structure, meaning one in a clear high time frame downtrend, until that is

the market structure shifts again. So, in short, ignore what the chart is saying at your peril.

If a crypto you thought dead shows signs of a high time frame bullish market structure,

higher highs, higher lows, increasing volume, increasing velocity, then disbelief will only cost

you an opportunity. Take Solana, for example. Sol fell by more than 95 percent between November 2021

and November 2022 when FTX collapsed. FTX looked like the final nail in the coffin for Solana,

which spent almost all of 2023 in a grueling range between around $13 and $32.

Sentiment was very poor, volumes were low, and many market participants appeared to have

written Solana off. But, as it turned out, this was only a near death experience. Sol started

closing candles above this range in Q4, and it was off to the races again. It went on to rally

to above $263 over the next year. Now, this may be an exception rather than the rule, because most

dead cryptos are not coming back. However, we think the more important takeaway here is just to keep

an eye on market structure and high time frame candle closures. So, while your peers are trying

to use fundamental analysis to explain why a dead coin pumped or a living coin dumped yesterday,

the chart will show you trends as they emerge, and crucially when they reverse in real time.

Richard Wykoff's market structure framework gave us the language we used to describe what we saw

with Solana in 2023, namely accumulation. He also coined the term distribution to describe what

we see with other assets that collapse and meander in the same way, but failed to recover as sold it.

Both accumulation and distribution can look like what some call sideways or choppy price action,

but there are important patterns that distinguish the two. A crypto in distribution will be printing

lower lows and lower highs, with volume that spikes only on the way down. Price slices through

support levels without any defense. There's no convincing demand just bleeding. This can continue

for a long time, often until the asset is completely abandoned. Accumulation looks different.

You get a selling climax, huge volume violent drop, but the price finds a bottom and enters a range,

chopping sideways for weeks or months as capitulation plays out and whales quietly absorb the supply.

A key feature of accumulation that follows is known as the spring. Price briefly breaks

below the established range. It looks dead. Trigger stop losses shakes out the last weekends,

and then sharply reclaims that level. This is the liquidity grab. Smart money needs sellers,

and the best way to create panic sellers is to make the chart look like it's going to zero.

Solana's range in 2023 was textbook accumulation. It held that range through multiple tests,

then reclaimed it on rising volume in Q4. That reclaim was the signal. Now, buying during the range

is brave, buying after the reclaim is strategic. As long as a crypto is still making new lows,

it's distributing. If it formed a range, held it and reclaimed it on volume, that's a different setup

entirely. So, is your crypto dead and will it ever recover? Well, to be frank, the odds are that

yes and no are the answers. But if you're holding a crypto with significant trading volume,

liquidity and exchange listings, it could be in with a chance. If it is still trending downwards,

you're playing with fire. If it's bottomed and showing signs of accumulation, you might be onto

something. Just remember, though, hope and fear are your worst enemies, and candle closures and

risk management are your friends. And if you're disappointed that we didn't name many names in this

video, I've got good news for you. We just made a whole video about the possibility that Ethereum

could die and send ETH to zero. How's that for some controversy? You can get the full story

right over here. That's all from me for now, though. So, as always, thank you all for watching,

and I'll see you next time. This is Guy Over and Out.

Hello, Guy again. Before you go, if you have a moment, please do rate and review us.

It really helps the podcast grow and find new listeners.

Okay, that's all for this episode. Thank you for listening, and see you again soon.