The total number of cryptocurrencies in circulation doubled in 2021

The number of cryptocurrencies in circulation has more than doubled by 2021, prompting investors to be even more careful when investing in a new token and to do thorough due diligence before making an investment decision.

Since 2021 with 8,153 coins and tokens, we are finishing the year with something like 16,237 coins and tokens, and this number is constantly increasing.

According to data from CoinMarketCap, the total number of cryptocurrencies will have doubled by the end of 2021. 

Meme coins, hacks, and other schemes with no future also constitute most of the projects added to the listings.

Growth can be seen in other locations as well. CoinGecko, for example, contained information on 6,098 currencies on January 1, 2021, and by the time this article was published, on December 31, 2021, we had discovered 12,142 projects listed on the website.

These statistics show us that the number of cryptocurrencies being created is exponential. 

Many of them could be possible scams on the market, fueled by the popularization of Bitcoin and taking advantage of the lack of knowledge of newbie investors to take money from them.

The number of cryptocurrencies is vastly increasing.

Sites like CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap are just filters, listing only cryptocurrencies that meet specific standards, such as a minimum registered volume, among other evaluation points each site uses.

Therefore, thousands of additional cryptocurrencies and tokens can only be found in blockchain explorers on networks such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, and Solana (among others), making it impossible to track all of the projects that have been created at present.

Even though cryptocurrency critic Peter Schiff stated that numerous altcoins on the market directly impact Bitcoin and its network, which is the largest on the crypto market, it is crucial to remember that the majority of these projects have only one goal: to vanish from existence.

On the other hand, Altcoins took advantage of the attention brought to Bitcoin by using pre-mining and other fraudulent gimmicks and pseudo-decentralization to make a fortune for its developers.

With this, it would already be feasible to distinguish between Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, a point of view with which Shiff does not appear to concur.

Nevertheless, it is just a matter of time before the meme coin craze fades away, leaving many people unsure whether to invest in cryptocurrencies like HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu, which uses the acronym BITCOIN.

However, one other project we can talk about is the Capybara (CAPY), which has the picture of a capybara, a common animal in Brazil.

This meme currency, for example, has had its value plummet by 60 percent in the last 24 hours, highlighting exactly how risky it is to invest in these kinds of businesses.

Capybara cryptocurrency drops 60%

Let’s turn everything into NFTs.

Aside from scam tokens such as the SQUID token, which we reported in our piece at the time of the hack and did not enable its investors to sell their coins, a significant number of about 16,000 altcoins listed by CoinMarketCap are derived from dogs and other unusual creatures.

There are practically all breeds of dogs available for investing at this kennel. Despite this, none of these projects has any real-world application other than entertainment. 

They were formed only to profit their creators, who own the vast majority of these tokens and are thus unknown to investors.

Aside from frauds involving worthless cryptocurrencies, Non-Fungible-Tokens (NFTs) are becoming an increasingly dangerous market for newcomers, as are play-to-earn games and other newnesses that may appear intriguing at first but should not be kept around for long.