54.02 $
-0.13% -0.07 $
54.02 $
-0.13% -0.07 $
Feathercoin hit $1.30 in June 2013. Its community was electric. Forum posts proclaimed it the "next Litecoin" and exchanges rushed to list it. The coin had a modified NeoScrypt algorithm, faster block times, and enthusiastic developers promising regular updates. By 2015, its price had cratered below $0.01. By 2020, daily trading volume was often under $500. Today it trades at roughly $0.001 when it trades at all, with a network hashrate so low that a single rented GPU rig could theoretically 51% attack it.
Feathercoin is not special. It is merely the most recognizable corpse in a graveyard containing hundreds of coins that launched between 2013 and 2015 with the explicit goal of being "better than Litecoin." They are all dead or functionally dead. Litecoin is still here, trading on every major exchange, with a $7+ billion market cap. Feathercoin was attacked for $16,000. That was the price of death in 2013. The question today: how much does it cost to kill Litecoin in 2026? The answer to that question is worth more than the rest of this article.
| Name | Year launched | ATH price | Current price/status | What killed it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feathercoin (FTC) | 2013 | $1.30 | ~$0.001 / ghost chain | 51% attacked in 2013, never recovered trust. Dev team dissolved. |
| Worldcoin (WDC) | 2013 | $0.75 | Dead / no network | No unique value proposition. Exchanges delisted. Community evaporated. |
| Novacoin (NVC) | 2013 | $40.00 | ~$0.10 / near-dead | Hybrid PoW/PoS was innovative but dev abandoned project. No exchanges. |
| Digitalcoin (DGC) | 2013 | $0.50 | Dead / delisted everywhere | Identical to LTC with minor parameter tweaks. No reason to exist. |
| Megacoin (MEC) | 2013 | $1.60 | Dead / ghost chain | Marketed on hype alone. Developer went silent. No exchange support. |
| Terracoin (TRC) | 2012 | $2.50 | Dead / no trading | SHA-256 clone competed with Bitcoin directly. No unique features. |
| Fastcoin (FST) | 2013 | $0.18 | Dead / abandoned | 12-second blocks caused chain instability. Gimmick over substance. |
| Anoncoin (ANC) | 2013 | $4.20 | Dead / project shut down | Privacy features never shipped. I2P integration remained vaporware. |
| Ixcoin (IXC) | 2011 | $0.80 | ~$0.001 / zombie | Bitcoin clone with no innovation. Premine controversy. Dev vanished. |
| Devcoin (DVC) | 2011 | $0.005 | Dead / fully abandoned | Charitable concept but hyperinflationary supply. Nobody wanted it. |
| Mincoin (MNC) | 2013 | $0.65 | Dead / no nodes | Scrypt clone with zero differentiation. Community died within months. |
| Phoenixcoin (PXC) | 2013 | $0.20 | Dead / blockchain halted | NeoScrypt algo change fragmented an already tiny mining community. |
| Goldcoin (GLC) | 2013 | $0.90 | ~$0.005 / zombie | 51% attacked repeatedly. Difficulty algo exploited by multipools. |
| Infinitecoin (IFC) | 2013 | $0.0003 | Dead / abandoned | 90.6 billion supply made it a meme. Novelty wore off in weeks. |
| BBQCoin (BQC) | 2012 | $0.15 | Dead / project closed | Joke coin that was taken seriously briefly. Obviously unsustainable. |
| Netcoin (NET) | 2014 | $0.005 | Dead / delisted | Launched too late in the altcoin wave. Zero adoption. |
| Stablecoin (SBC) | 2013 | $0.25 | Dead / ironic name | Name had nothing to do with stability. Difficulty algo was broken. |
| Mooncoin (MOON) | 2014 | $0.0001 | Dead / no volume | 384 billion supply. Pure meme. Brief Reddit pump, then nothing. |
| Potcoin (POT) | 2014 | $0.34 | ~$0.002 / zombie | Cannabis niche was too small. Dennis Rodman stunt was peak. Abandoned. |
| Vertcoin (VTC) | 2014 | $9.50 | ~$0.03 / barely alive | Repeated 51% attacks (2018, 2019, 2021). ASIC resistance failed. |
Look at that table and you see the same story playing out twenty times with minor variations. A coin launches with some marginal tweak to Litecoin's parameters. The crypto community, starved for the next 1000x opportunity, piles in. The price spikes. Then reality sets in: there are no developers maintaining the code, no exchanges willing to keep the pair listed through a bear market, no merchants accepting it, no reason for it to exist when Litecoin already fills the "silver to Bitcoin's gold" niche perfectly well.
The causes of death cluster into five categories:
When you compare the survivors to the dead, a clear pattern emerges. Survival in crypto requires a combination of factors that compound over time:
Continuous development. Litecoin's codebase has been actively maintained since 2011. It has tracked Bitcoin Core upstream changes, implemented SegWit, added MWEB privacy, and is now shipping LitVM for smart contract capability. The GitHub never went dark. Compare this to Feathercoin, whose last meaningful commit was in 2017.
Exchange and payment support. Litecoin was listed on every major exchange from the early days and stayed listed through every bear market. It is on Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and literally hundreds of other platforms. This liquidity moat cannot be replicated retroactively. A coin that gets delisted during a bear market almost never comes back.
Merged mining with Dogecoin. Since 2014, Litecoin miners also mine Dogecoin through merged mining. This means Litecoin's Scrypt hashrate secures two major networks simultaneously, making economic attacks far more expensive. None of the dead coins had this dual-network security model.
Charlie Lee's persistence. Love him or hate him, Charlie Lee has been the face of Litecoin for over a decade. He maintained relationships with Bitcoin Core developers, advocated publicly for protocol upgrades, and kept Litecoin in the conversation during periods when the broader market had written it off. Most dead coins had anonymous or pseudonymous developers who simply vanished.
Fair launch. Litecoin had no premine, no ICO, no insider allocation. This matters because coins with premines create adversarial dynamics between founders and community. When Ixcoin's developer was revealed to have premined 580,000 coins, trust collapsed instantly.
Between 2013 and 2015, approximately 500 altcoins were created. Most were Scrypt-based, most explicitly positioned themselves as Litecoin competitors or "improvements." Of those ~500 coins:
Litecoin did not just survive. It remained in the top 20 by market cap continuously for over 13 years. That is an extraordinary achievement in an industry where the average project lifespan is about 18 months.
Survivorship bias is the single most dangerous cognitive error in cryptocurrency investing. When people say "if you had bought LTC in 2013 at $2, you'd have 50x your money" they are telling a true story about the winners while ignoring the 490+ coins from the same era that went to zero.
The mathematical reality is brutal: if you had invested $100 equally across all 500 altcoins launched in 2013-2014, your total return would be deeply negative despite Litecoin and a handful of others doing well. The winners do not compensate for the scale of losses across the graveyard.
This has direct implications for evaluating today's new projects. The structural requirements for long-term survival have not changed:
If the answer to any of these is "no" or "unclear," history says the project will join the graveyard. It is not a matter of if. It is a matter of when.
None of this means Litecoin cannot die. It means it has survived challenges that killed hundreds of similar projects, and that each year of survival makes the next year more likely. Network effects, mining infrastructure, exchange integrations, and payment processor support all compound over time. But complacency kills. The threats Litecoin faces today are different from 2013 — not 51% attacks, but narrative death, regulatory pressure, and technological displacement. Different monsters, same jungle.
According to data aggregators tracking historical crypto projects, over 24,000 cryptocurrency projects have been created since 2009. More than 14,000 of these are considered dead — meaning zero trading volume, no active development, and no functioning network. The mortality rate exceeds 55% across all eras, and for the 2013-2015 vintage specifically, it exceeds 85%.
Litecoin survived through a combination of continuous development, deep exchange liquidity, merged mining security with Dogecoin, fair launch distribution, and persistent community and leadership. No single factor explains it — survival requires all of these simultaneously over long time periods. A project that has great development but no liquidity dies. A project that has liquidity but no development dies. Only the combination survives decade-long timescales.
Yes. No cryptocurrency is immortal. Litecoin faces ongoing threats from narrative erosion, stablecoin competition for payments, regulatory risk around MWEB privacy features, and the long-term security budget problem as block rewards halve toward zero. The probability of death has decreased with each passing year of survival, but it is never zero. See our detailed threat analysis for a structured assessment of current risks.
Last updated: May 2026. Prices and project statuses verified against CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko data. Internal links: Litecoin history | Mining dashboard | Merged mining guide | Network security data
