Over 60% of Top 100 Cryptocurrencies Have No Working Product, Study Claims

Of the top 100 cryptocurrencies listed by market capitalization, only 36 are actually what the authors term “working products” in a study recently published online. Newer ecosystem website, Invest in Blockchain, commissioned the study. It’s sure to be debated, and hotly, as to which coins made the cut to 36, but the authors attempt to assure readers certain standards were applied across the board in order to make their determination much of the cryptosphere is a giant dumpster fire.
A Cold 36% Out of 100 Top Cryptocurrencies Have Working Products
In fact a cold 36% of the top 100 cryptos have what the writers define as “working products.” They agree that “it’s important to define what exactly constitutes a working product in the first place.” Simply taking into account a project being “open-source, building a basic blockchain and launching it isn’t a very high bar to set. We wanted to be a bit more rigorous with our criteria.”

“If you haven’t run into at least a handful of people who are cynical about the state of the blockchain industry and think it’s mostly scams and vaporware, well… you probably haven’t been into crypto for very long,” John Bardinelli and Daniel Frumkin wrote in the study, Cryptocurrencies In The Top 100 With Working Products That Are In-Use. “And the truth is, those cynics have a good point.”

The study was put out by the site, Invest in Blockchain, founded in 2017. They claim to have “researched the top 100 cryptocurrencies (by market cap) in an effort to learn how many of them actually had working products that are providing real value. The same research done in 2017 may have yielded some truly discouraging results but, even now, the results aren’t exactly stellar.”

For the authors of the study, a “working product” is 1. “active and available to the public,” 2. “Its mainnet has likely been released for some time, bumping the version numbers well above 1.0,” and 3. “Businesses and individuals use it on a daily basis for dapps, smart contracts, or digital currency transactions.”

Dash Doesn’t Make the List
As they researched, the authors were sure to match project promises made to what has actually been delivered, the present state of the company, its roadmap, and release history. Still, there “are many projects in the top 100 that have launched their mainnet, and can claim to have a ‘working product’ by a loose definition,” the authors note.

“However, we have chosen not to include projects which aren’t actually being used by any significant measure, which means that most of the recently launched mainnets will not yet meet our criteria.” For example, “a dapp platform that has a mainnet but that doesn’t have any noteworthy dapps on top of it isn’t considered ‘working’ by this criteria,” they conclude.

Projects that made the cut are: “0x Protocol, Ardor, Augur, Bancor, basic attention token, bibox token, Binance Coin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitshares, bytecoin, decred, ethereum, Golem, Huobi Token, komodo, Kucoin Shares, kyber network, litecoin, Loom Network, Monero, nano, NEO, PIVX, Polymath, Pundi X, QTUM, Ripple, Siacoin, Steem, stellar, tether, Wanchain, Waves, ZCash, and zencash.”

As noted, there is bound to be controversy with lists such as these. Commenter PertReader1 notes, “LOL you include PIVX a fork of Dash, but ignore Dash? You mention that PIVX ‘launched’ in 2016, yeah as a fork of Dash. How can you practice such yellow journalism?” One of the authors, John Bardinelli responded, “We left Dash out of the picture because of Dash Evolution. DE redefines the project’s focus.” To which yet another commenter, kanuuker1, fumed, “That’s a total load of crap. Evolution is only the next major update. Our goals haven’t changed in years. Dash has a fully working project and is much further along in its development than every other project.”

Do you think there are too many coins out there? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.