Dead tokens and blockchains

 
Good morning/evening
 
After writing about what I see as a possible death of the Helium network, (They did have their own blockchain in the beginning before moving to Solana) or at least the peoples network as it was called, I started thinking about other blockchains or tokens that have disappeared that were once tipped to be the next big thing, only to quietly disappear into oblivion. The ones that were going to flip Bitcoin, replace Ethereum, revolutionise finance or become the backbone of Web3.Crypto moves incredibly fast. One minute everyone is convinced a project is going to change the world, the next minute it is gone.
 

 
Every whitepaper promised faster transactions, lower fees, infinite scalability and partnerships with companies you'd never actually heard of. Investors were throwing money at projects simply because they had a fancy website, a roadmap full of buzzwords and a Telegram group full of rocket emojis.
Even today the numbers are huge and millions of tokens have been created across all blockchains. That sounds great until you realise that creating a token today can take very little time or even capital. The vast majority never had any intention of becoming the next Bitcoin as many were created as experiments, others were meme coins that lasted a few hours, days or weeks before everyone moved on. Some were outright scams. And plenty started with genuine intentions but simply couldn't attract enough users to survive. Here are just a few.
 
OneCoin
Not technically a cryptocurrency because there wasn't actually a blockchain, just a scam ponzi scheme. It became one of the largest financial frauds ever, with billions lost. Many newcomers to crypto still confuse it with legitimate projects.
Squid Game Token (SQUID)
Rode the popularity of the Netflix series before the developers performed one of crypto's most famous rug pulls. Investors couldn't even sell their tokens before the creators disappeared with the money.

FRIEND (Friend.tech) - 2024

Friend.tech exploded onto the scene in 2023, with users paying to buy keys to chat with influencers. At one point it was generating more fees than many major blockchains. By 2024, user numbers had collapsed, revenue dried up and the platform effectively became a ghost town despite still existing.
Terra Classic (LUNC) – Still trades strangely enough but mostly through speculation after the original ecosystem collapsed.
I could go on and this list could be huge, although when you do a deep dive on some blockchains the actual daily usage and TVL is so bad they may as well be dead chains!
 

 
 
There are also chains that are still going that looked as though they would be great but are just barely surviving, a couple I thought were amazing were Polkadot DOT and even Internet computer ICP, again this list could also be huge really. It comes down again to that basic question of how many blockchains and tokens do we really need? Then there are the meme tokens, a lot of pump and dumps, but made in huge numbers daily
There may be thousands of crypto currencies but it also means there is an enormous amount of competition. Every new Layer 1 is trying to convince developers to abandon the chains they're already building on. Every payment token is trying to replace the dozens that came before it. Every AI token claims to be changing the world but most will not (I think I hold a couple of those!) I think we're still in that stage where innovation is happening at an incredible pace, but nobody really knows which projects will still be standing ten or twenty years from now. I don't even bother to do any research on those 'the next 1000x coin' anymore. I used to panic if something new came out and I did not have time to research it.......Am I going to miss out on the next big thing? Now it is more like 'Oh another one'.
 
I used to own far too many altcoins because I thought I was diversifying, covering all the bases, there were so many I couldn't keep up with what was going on with all of them, and the wallets lol, so many wallets! The bear markets can act like a filter where weak projects disappear, communities fade away and developers move on. My main holding is Bitcoin, It's survived exchange collapses, government bans, countless obituaries from the media, fighting within its own community and more than one occasion where people confidently declared it was dead. I call it my safe bet, even though I know there are no safe bets in crypto. 
 
So at the end of the day, my portfolio may seem smaller, less diverse because I am not trying to catch half a dozen of the next shiny new tokens but it is easier to manage, I can sleep at night and I have time to do other things. I just think there are way to many tokens and blockchains and not nearly enough capital floating around to sustain them all, almost like survival of the fittest, some have great tech with little adoption, some have great speed and some are not user friendly and in the end the list of dead blockchains and tokens will just keep getting longer and even some that are not dead, may as well be with the usage they actually have. What are your thoughts? Do you think there are too many blockchains and tokens?
 
As always, thank you for reading and please feel free to comment.