Each cycle creates coins that are not only traded, but believed. They come with a founder who gives great news, a white paper that reads like a manifesto, and a promise that goes far beyond the price: this one will replace the cloud, connect every blockchain, or put billions of machines on-chain.
Then the cycle ends. And it ends again.
The back end of the market makes the comparison difficult. Bitcoin is trading in the mid-$60,000s after reaching about $126,000 in October 2025, the total value of the crypto market is close to $2.17 trillion, Bitcoin dominance is above 56%, and the Fear and Greed Index is in fear. Capital does not revolve around risk. It has been quiet.
This means that the bottom line doesn’t go down because of one bad week. They are down because two full cycles have come and gone without them returning to where they started. Here we are five of the most impressive examplesthey are placed at a distance according to how they fall on their tips.
5. Cosmos (ATOM): what happened to the Internet of Blockchains?
Cosmos should be connected to crypto. One SDK to build each blockchain, one protocol (IBC) to allow them all to communicate with each other, and one place in between, secured by ATOM. In 2021, the “Internet of Blockchains” was one of the most powerful stories in the market.
- Where it is now: The surprising thing is that the skill is very useful. The Cosmos SDK overpowered Celestia, Injective, dYdX, Sei and Terra. IBC still moves real volume. What failed was the signal. Every chain that was started with Cosmos tools was established with its own brand, its own guarantees and its own funds, and dYdX eventually created its own chain and took over its business. ATOM secured the site and did not capture anything. The proposal of 2022 “ATOM 2.0”, which tried to fix it exactly, was voted by the community. The departure of Jae Kwon and the reign of the year did something else.
- Price: ATOM trades at about $1.39 against the all-time high of about $44.70 set in September 2021. This is about 96.8% below the peak, with a market capitalization of about $727 million.
4. Algorand (ALGO): can learning reliability save the brand?
Algorand had the best CV in the industry. Founded by Silvio Micali, an MIT professor and Turing Award winner, it pioneered a cost-effective proof-of-concept that is stable and fork-free, and markets itself as one that can be used by organizations and governments. He got the support of the FIFA World Cup and the group of central and state pilots.
- Where it is now: The chain still works exactly as advertised. Blogs are fast, the fees are small, and they don’t lose much. But the developers went Ethereum L2s and Solana, DeFi liquidity is not up to par, and pilots don’t convert to recurring volume. Algorand is now looking closer to post-quantum security and the real economy, which is the opposite of reality, but so far it’s a technology rather than a desire. ALGO posted a record low in March 2026.
- Price: ALGO trades at about $0.084 against the all-time high of $3.56 since June 2019, about 97.6% below the peak, and the market cap is about $758 million.
3. IOTA: what coins are left in the Internet of Things?
IOTA will be a virtual currency. No blocks, no miners, no fees. Instead an acyclic index called Tangle, where each transaction confirms two others, which theoretically means that it started to accelerate. Refrigerators that pay to repair themselves, cars that pay to park themselves, sensors that sell data. At the end of 2017 this article pushed into the top five funds.
- Where it is now: The economy of the free machine did not happen. The “Microsoft Agreement” of 2017 which became the driving force of the data market undermined the credibility, the wallet of the Trinity broke down in 2020 and forced the group to stop all networks for several weeks, and the founding team is divided in the group. IOTA has rebuilt itself from the ground up as a Move-based, DAG-consensus L1 oriented platform DeFi it is a real treasure. It’s a legitimate technological innovation. It’s a very different product than what people bought in 2017, and the market has priced it accordingly. The signal is always very low.
- Price: IOTA trades at about $0.035 against the all-time high of $5.25 since December 2017, about 99.3% below the peak, with a market capitalization of about $158 million.
2. EOS / Vaulta (A): What did $4.1 billion buy?
The biggest ICO in history. Block.one sold the token for a whole year and raised about $4.1 billion for the “Ethereum killer” with millions of transactions per second with zero fees. It was, at the time, the highest paid job in crypto.
- Where it is now: The SEC settled with Block.one for $24 million in 2019, a round error in the upgrade. The promises came, the requests didn’t happen, and people spent years fighting Block.one over unused and unfulfilled funds. In 2025 the network was rebranded to Vaulta and the bank pitch of Web3, and the ticker changed from EOS to A. The rebrand created a long rally, then a fall: a new low in January 2026, another around $0.057 in June 2026, and the resignation of the CEO who led the executive.
- Price: Vaulta trades around $0.06 against EOS’s regular price of $22.89 since April 2018, about 99.6% below the rate, with a market capitalization of around $105 million.
1. Internet Computer (ICP): how does the signal fall to 99.7%?
The most ambitious competition for 2021. Dfinity spent more than $500 million on R&D to create a blockchain that can host all applications end-to-end, instead of AWS, Google Cloud and traditional web hosting. Websites, databases, front ends and payments, all run on chain. It was described as something less than the standard internet.
- Where it is now: ICP was listed in May 2021 at a price that indicated the market would be close to $400 billion at its peak, which would have made it one of the largest technology stocks in the world. Then the initial shares opened in a bearish market and the price broke immediately. This technology is unusual and is still deployed, by ckBTC, an AI experiment on the chain with the “Mission 70” proposal published in February 2026 to reduce the drop in group prices by 70% by 2027. But inflation was not a big problem. Application. Every program on the Internet burns the ICP, so the fix only works if the programs arrive.
- Price: ICP trades at about $2.15 against the all-time high of $700.65 as of May 2021, about 99.7% below the peak, with a market cap of $1.2 billion.
Damages in one table
| Money | Peak | A great day | Now | From ATH | Market cap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Internet Computing ($ICP) | $700.65 | May 2021 | $2.15 | ~99.7% | $1.2B |
| EOS / Vault ($A) | $22.89 | April 2018 | $0.06 | ~99.6% | ~$105M |
| $IOTA | $5.25 | December 2017 | $0.035 | ~99.3% | $158M |
| Algorand ($ALGO) | $3.56 | June 2019 | $0.084 | ~97.6% | $758M |
| Cosmos ($ATOM) | $44.70 | September 2021 | $1.39 | ~96.8% | $727M |
*Figures reflect information at time of writing and will change.
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What do all five have in common?
None of these projects are scams, and none of them are technically dead. Each network still creates blocks. Each team still sends. This is what makes the series interesting rather than depressing.
The example is not a cheat, with three repeated errors:
- The sign was not a cure. Cosmos is the big problem. The technology won, the brand did not, because the tree was made of chains attached to it instead of a chain in the middle.
- Purchase arrived before expected. ICP and EOS both hit the market with huge valuations and massive opening schedules combined, which is a mathematical windfall without technical innovation.
- The story ran out of time faster than the road map. The wealth of the IOTA machine and the number of Algorand corporations were both multi-year speculations in a market that fluctuates every 90 days. When the medicine was ready, the matter belonged to another person.
Are some of these coins still worth seeing?
There is a real argument that some of these things are the lowest in the market: operational technology, small inventory, work teams, almost zero expectations. Trading a stock 99% below its peak does not require a new bull market to double; it takes one credible reason for anyone to care.
There is a real argument that an indicator that has failed to return its volume on two full lines is telling you something it isn’t. Networks can live forever while their tokens go nowhere, and dead money is still dead money even if GitHub is active.
What will change the picture is not the announcement of the agreement or the restructuring. It’s a test, a repeat, a paycheck that has to pass the mark. As far as one in five of these can show, the charts are an honest summary.
