Every January, CoinMarketCap publishes a snapshot of the 100 biggest cryptocurrencies. We took all twelve, from 2014 to 2025, 509 different coins in total, and checked what each one is today: still trading, migrated to a new token, barely alive, or gone.
- 91% of January 2014's top coins are dead. So are 83% of 2016's and 44% of 2018's. Even 36% of the 2020 list is gone.
- The top 10 isn't safe. 39 coins have made a January top 10; 17 of them (44%) are now outside the top 100 or untracked, including EOS, IOTA, NEM, Steem and Terra (LUNA).
- Holding the top 20 lost to holding bitcoin, every year. In all 12 cohorts the median top-20 coin did worse than bitcoin bought the same day. None of the other 19 in 2018's or 2022's top 20 beat it.
- Even recent lists are under water: 18 of January 2025's top 20 are worth less today than they were then.
The crypto market is cruel. Most of what I saw in 2017 is either gone for good or fell out of the top 100 years ago, and the numbers back that up: only 11 of January 2017's top 100 are still there today. Projects that looked super promising back then are ghost towns now. The recent lists look gentler than 2014 to 2017, though those coins have had far less time to fail.
| January | Coins | Dead today | Share | Still in today's top 100 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 67 | 61 | 91% | 4 |
| 2015 | 100 | 88 | 88% | 7 |
| 2016 | 100 | 83 | 83% | 9 |
| 2017 | 100 | 71 | 71% | 11 |
| 2018 | 100 | 44 | 44% | 17 |
| 2019 | 100 | 34 | 34% | 21 |
| 2020 | 100 | 36 | 36% | 26 |
| 2021 | 100 | 12 | 12% | 36 |
| 2022 | 100 | 5 | 5% | 43 |
| 2023 | 100 | 4 | 4% | 48 |
| 2024 | 100 | 2 | 2% | 53 |
| 2025 | 100 | 1 | 1% | 66 |
Read the right side of the chart with care: a coin from 2024 has had two years to fail, a coin from 2014 twelve. The recent lists will look worse with time; the older ones show where they tend to end up.
What "dead" means here
We opened each coin's CoinMarketCap page on 8 October 2026 and followed every redirect. A coin counts as dead when CoinMarketCap no longer tracks it (untracked, inactive or removed) or when it is a zombie: still listed, but with less than $10,000 traded in a day. That's less than a single bitcoin, across every exchange in the world.
Coins that moved to a new token are not dead. Polygon's MATIC became POL, for example, and is counted as migrated.
The top 10 is not a safe harbour
Being one of the biggest coins in a given January says little about the next five years. Of the 39 coins that have ever been in a January top 10, 17 have dropped out of today's top 100 or disappeared: Augur, Binance USD, BitShares, BitShares PTS, EOS, IOTA, MaidSafeCoin, Megacoin, Namecoin, NEM, Nxt, Omni, Paycoin, Peercoin, Quark, Steem and Terra.
Bitcoin beat the field
Suppose you had put $1 into each of the top 20 coins in January and held. In every one of the twelve years, the median coin did worse than $1 of bitcoin bought the same day. The best year for the field was 2021, when 5 of the 20 beat bitcoin; in 2018 and 2022, none did.
There were spectacular exceptions. Ether bought in January 2016 multiplied by 2,626; Monero from January 2015 by 1,325; Dogecoin from January 2014 by 323, beating bitcoin's 89 over the same period. But you had to pick them out of a list where most of the others went to zero.
Even ether, the number two, has lost ground since 2018: measured in bitcoin it is down 54% since January 2018.
How we tested
| The lists | CoinMarketCap's historical snapshot for the first week of each January, 2014-2025: the top 100 by market cap (2014 had only 67 coins). 509 distinct coins |
| Today's status | Each coin's CoinMarketCap page, fetched 8 October 2026, redirects followed; migrations to a new token recorded separately and counted as alive |
| Dead | Untracked, inactive or removed on CoinMarketCap, or listed with under $10,000 of 24-hour volume |
| Value | Price in the January snapshot vs the coin's price on its page on 8 October 2026; a dead or removed coin is worth 0. Bitcoin at $82,613 that day |
| Not covered | Coins that never reached a January top 100; fees and taxes; staking rewards |
Download the data: coins.csv (every coin, every cohort, today's status) · value.csv · the CSV behind each chart : t2-beat-bitcoin.csv, t2-dead-by-cohort.csv.
Check a coin yourself
Any of these markets can be charted in TabChart, which is free: open the coin on Binance, Kraken, Bybit or OKX, set a weekly timeframe and compare it against bitcoin. To see what a regular monthly buy would have done instead, try the DCA calculator.
FAQ
How many cryptocurrencies have failed? Of the top 100 in January 2014, 91% are dead today. Of January 2018's top 100, 44%. Most coins outside the top 100 never had the liquidity to begin with.
What counts as a dead coin? One that CoinMarketCap no longer tracks, or one that still trades less than $10,000 a day. A coin that migrated to a new token isn't dead.
Did any coin beat bitcoin? A few, in some years: ether from 2016, Monero from 2015, Dogecoin from 2014 and 2017, BNB from 2019 to 2021. In every cohort, though, the median top-20 coin did worse than bitcoin.
Is a top-10 coin safe? Not over years: 44% of all coins that ever made a January top 10 are now outside the top 100.
