Like in every bull run, most altcoins will die with the next bull run , probably around 75% like in the last bull run, where 75% of the top 100 died and fell into obscurity. Historical Snapshot — May 22, 2016 | CoinMarketCap
Let’s look at the top 100 to see which ones will disappear.
First, all the scam coins.
- Hshare
- Veritaseum
- WINCOIN, because it’s a scam
- Bitcoin Gold, because it’s a scam
- Bitcoin Diamond, because it’s a scam
Those coins have all stopped communicating and they didn’t offer much to begin with anyway.
Then, all the weak coins will follow
- Litecoin
- Dogecoin
Then, most likely all the extremely centralized coins will follow. The one thing they have in common is that they have very fancy branding and market, because they are run by business guys, who understand tricking people very well, but who don’t care at all about decentralization.
All of those projects offer such fancy functionality and partnerships and bla-bla, but these don’t matter, because if their architecture is so centralized, the security of the network is very vulnerable to attacks.
- EOS, because they are permissioned and non-trustless and thus centralized
- Stellar, because they are permissioned and non-trustless and thus centralized
- NEO, because they are permissioned and non-trustless and thus centralized
- Lisk, because it’s permissioned and non-trustless
- Ark, because it’s permissioned and non-trustless
- TRON, because they are simply very sketchy and also centralized with PoS
- Tezos, because while they have good decentralization they have very low scalability (300TPS) and are year(s) away from a production ready scalability solution
- Bitshares, because it’s an old project from Dan Larimer which doesn’t get much love anymore
- Ontology, because it’s permissioned and non-trustless
- ICON, because it’s extremely centralized
- Verge, because it’s a privacy coin without privacy
- Populous, because their use case is very narrow
Then, probably all the average coins will follow that simply don’t have a unique differentiator or they are very bad in getting adoption due to lack of a good marketing team.
- Monero, because a privacy coin is useful, but privacy is a feature that is easy to replicate
- ZCash, because a privacy coin is useful, but privacy is a feature that is easy to replicate
- ETC, because they are too similar to Ethereum while having a 10x smaller community
- QTUM, because while smart contracts on Bitcoin is useful, they don’t seem to be able to really take advantage of their potential
- OmiseGo, because while it is useful, there is not enough uniqueness about them to differentiate against its numerous competitors
- Decred, because they have been around for ages, but still have very little adoption
- Bytecoin, because they have been around for ages, but still have very little adoption
- Digibyte, because they have been around for ages, but still have very little adoption
The ones that have the best chances of surviving are
- Bitcoin, because it is still too big too fail
- Bitcoin Cash, because it is still too big too fail
- XRP, because they are too big too fail still despite being non-trustless
- Ethereum, because it is still too big too fail and has some really good things coming with Casper, Raiden, Plasma, Sharding
- Elastos, because it is probably the best out of all 2,000 cryptocurrencies
- Cardano, because it is a really good platform, though it is somewhat centralized with stake pooling
- IOTA, because it is the best platform next to Elastos of all 2,000 cryptocurrencies
- BNB, because it belongs to Binance, the biggest crypto exchange
- VeChain, because they probably have the best marketing and PR team
- ZRX, because it’s useful
- Aeternity, because they have an interesting implementation of Bitcoin NG, which might put them at the top next to Elastos and IOTA soon
- BAT, because they are the token with the most traction with 5 million monthly active users after 5 months
- Siacoin, because they have good tech, albeit they have many competitors with Maidsafe, Storj, Gbyte, IOTA, Sky
- Maker, because a stable coin is useful
- Nano, because it is almost as good as IOTA
- Golem, because they have good tech, albeit they have good competition with Aelf, IOTA
- Augur, because it has an interesting use case with betting and it already has $1M worth of bets online, so there is definitely a need there
From the #50–#100, I only think those will survive the purge
- Holochain, because it’s probably the best platform next to Elastos and Nano of all 2,000 cryptocurrencies
- Nexo, because there is a huge demand for crypto-lending
- DigixDAO, because a decentralized stable coin is needed
- KuCoin Shares, because fee tokens are useful
- Huobi Token, because fee tokens are useful
- Maidsafecoin, because it has probably even better tech than siacoin
- FunFair, because they do quite good work with Casinos
- PowerLedger, because energy is probably the best use case for the blockchain
The rest have weak fundamentals and still little traction. If you can’t get traction while everyone else does, you get purged.
Conclusion
Looking at the Top 100, exactly 75 coins have rather weak fundamentals and have a high likelihood to be purged. That doesn’t mean that all of them will definitely disappear over the next few years. They could announce amazing technology or realize that they should stop being permissioned and non-trustless, but that is also probably unlikely.