The year 2022 was particularly difficult for the cryptocurrency industry as setbacks kept stacking up, including the collapse of the Terra (LUNA) ecosystem and the FTX crypto exchange, killing off dozens of crypto projects regardless of the amount of money invested in them.
Indeed, of the 96 cryptocurrency projects that were declared ‘dead’ this year, 28 had received funding, bringing the total ‘dead’ project financing amount to $3.61 billion, as per the “2022 Crypto Industry Dead Project List” released by the crypto analytics database RootData on December 27.
Most ‘dead’ project funds went to FTX
Among the largest beneficiaries of these investments is the recently collapsed crypto trading platform FTX, which had accumulated $1.73 billion through various funding rounds from investors, including Coinbase Ventures, Binance Labs, Pantera Capital, Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, and others.
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Meanwhile, due to regulatory reasons established in the state of California to facilitate access to residents of the United States, its subsidiary FTX US received an influx of $400 million from the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board.
Starting with July 2020, the now-bankrupt crypto lending platform Celsius Network received a total of $788.8 million from investors, including equity firm WestCap and Canadian pension fund manager Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CPDQ).
BlockFi is another failed crypto borrowing platform that was, on top of this, accused by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of providing unregistered securities while offering variable interest payments. This platform received a total of $499.85 million from major investors such as ConsenSys Mesh, Morgan Creek Digital, and Winklevoss Capital.
Finally, crypto asset broker Voyager Digital is another contender that managed to attract investments amounting to $135 million from Alameda Research, Galaxy Digital, Binance.US, and Digital Currency Group, before filing for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection in early July.
‘Dead’ coins in 2022
Meanwhile, the number of digital assets listed on the crypto tracking platform CoinGecko declared ‘dead’ in 2022 rose to 951 as of the end of November, which is still less than compared to 3,322 in 2021 and 1,320 in 2020, but more compared to 807 in 2019, as Finbold earlier reported.
According to the platform’s data, an average of 947 cryptocurrencies listed each year in the period between 2018 and 2022 have ended up deactivated and delisted from CoinGecko, excluding the anomaly year of 2021.
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