Many popular crypto projects have not been updated by developers in months or even years.


All software has bugs and needs to continually evolve to stay competitive.

What’s fascinating with crypto is that the code is open source. This means it’s possible to see how active the developers for any project are.

Many well known projects are incredibly popular with devs. Thousands of new devs are joining the crypto space each year.

On the other hand, many other projects, **collectively worth billions,** are effectively abandoned by their developers. Others have none or virtually no open source code to begin with.

Here’s the top 10 largest inactive projects by market cap that I found:

On average, projects in the top 500 market cap get updated 357 times a year by their devs. There are potentially hundreds of assets that don’t appear to be updated anywhere near that level.

Many of the projects above haven’t been updated a single time in the past year. Others just a handful of times. The [full report is here]( if you want to see each one in detail.

If you’re just trying to trade the hype, then this might not matter to you in the short term. Over a longer time period, though, the reality is bound to catch up with these “dead” projects. Investing in a project that is no longer being actively developed is clearly adding another layer of risk.

As always DYOR.

Edit: The word “popular” in the title is causing some controversy, as it’s obviously subjective. These are just the 10 largest by market cap. The total market cap of the 10 projects is over $3B, so clearly some people must still be holding a lot of these coins & tokens.

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28 thoughts on “Many popular crypto projects have not been updated by developers in months or even years.”

  1. Good read, recommend interested people click the link to check out the most active projects. Found that more interesting honestly. Thanks for sharing.

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  2. Exactly, thats why it’s always important to stay ahead in the ever changing market. For instance decentralized autonomous entities like BitDAO make an effort to be future proof, constantly working on improving which is essential to stay relevant and alive in the market where everyday a lot of things die and new ones emerge

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  3. I actually have one of these and I knew it was trash when I got it, it will stay dying in my wallet until the end of time to commemorate me being stupid.

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  4. Safemooners will unfortunately never accept their crap meme token is just another dying project that made the Dev team a ton of money.

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  5. Thanks for the quality content.

    The report is very good to evaluate the future of some projects.

    I had never heard of Akash, for example.

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  6. Where is this list from? Zenon isn’t dead. It’s actively being developed and the developers post updates quite often. The main net should be live soon. Idk how zenon makes this list when it’s far from abandoned.

    Even more irony that everyone is calling this list “shit coins” and wonder where people find coins before they moon.

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  7. All dead projects would continue pumping, as they enter into the MEME coin category, just like DOGE! Don’t reason logic, coz its magic!

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  8. Also, these days it is difficult to 51% attack a coin, since most exchanges ONLY deposit the coin on full 5-10 confirmations. The attacker has a limited time window to reorganize the block and change the data on the blockchain (even if he has 99% hashrate).

    It all depends – when you spend the coins – when does the receiver accept it? On 1 confirmation OR on full/max (e.g. 10) network confirmations allowed?

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  9. Oh man, When I started into crypto I jumped into 2 of these. We were all chasing pumps. Doge coin was fun, etc. Today I wouldn’t touch these with a 10 foot poll. There’s better tech to invest your $ in.

    Reply

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