Of The Top 10 Cryptocurrencies By Market Cap, Which Do You Believe Is The Most Likely To Fail And…

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Now this is my kind of question…

To start, let’s get our definitions clear: failure (by my criteria) is defined as the price dropping below 95% of it’s current value and remaining below that value indefinitely. I’m being pedantic here because, even with cryptocurrencies that were clearly abandoned by their developers, their tokens are still traded somewhere in the world. Cryptocurrencies don’t die, they turn into zombies, neither dead nor alive.

As of January 9th, 2018, here are the top 10 cryptocurrencies:

Which is the most likely to fail? Without a doubt, it’s TRON. Here’s how I got to that answer:

First, let’s eliminate the ones I don’t think are going to fail, either from longevity or strong teams/support. For me, that includes:

• Bitcoin
• Litecoin
• NEM
• Ethereum

It’s not that I think these projects have zero chance of failure, but in my opinion these are the four least likely to fail.

After this, we have newer projects that are direct competitors to older incumbents. These include:

• Bitcoin Cash
• Cardano

While these projects are less than a year old, they’re fighting their incumbents hard (Bitcoin and Ethereum, respectively). It’s possible that these won’t remain in the top 10, but if they can prove a viable alternative to their competitor, they’re not going to fail.

IOTA is special, because I think it’s most certainly overvalued at it’s current price, but is too new and different to judge fairly today. Even by blockchain standards, IOTA is pretty rough around the edges. However, it’s working on a new DLT implementation with tangle and deserves more time to prove itself out before saying it’s going to fail. I think it’s chance of success is less than the other blockchains mentioned above, but that’s only because of how young the project is, not because of any (obvious) damning faults.

After this we have the Ripple products, which include:

• Ripple
• Stellar

I have my misgivings with Ripple[1] and considering that Stellar is a fork of Ripple, it’s suffers many of the same faults. However, I think that TRON has many more misgivings, making these less likely to fail by comparison.

So, what makes TRON the most likely to fail in the top 10? Here are my reasons:

• TRON is going to be a separate blockchain, but the token was issued as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, so it’s unreleased at this time. No other top 10 blockchain product shares that attributed. So it has the chance to fail even before a product is launched.
• This leads directly to the second problem: because the product is unreleased, but the token is so valuable and wide-spread, it makes it much more susceptible to an unrecoverable market crash. The additional attention will mean that flaws will get magnified and analyzed by a much wider audience. Being small allows teams to get their product right before prime time, but TRON will get no such grace period.
• Then there’s the claim of plagiarism. It seems that portions of the English and Chinese whitepapers were lifted directly from competitors, including IPFS and BitSwap. This is also a poor long-term signal.

Because of this, I think TRON is the most likely to fail in the top 10.

Footnotes

[1] The Ripple Currency Problem: Why Permissioned Blockchains Will Devalue XRP

Originally published at www.quora.com. Answered on January 9th, 2018

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