Shitcoins: how to distinguish a dummy token from a promising one

What are shitcoins and how to recognize them?

As of December 2025, almost 90,000 different tokens are registered on just one website, CoinMarketCap. And according to the CoinGecko platform, the total number of cryptocurrencies in 2024 exceeded 2.5 million, with more than 5,300 digital assets issued on average every day.

However, most of these tokens are shitcoins with virtually zero liquidity and user activity.

What are shitcoins?

Shitcoins are any useless tokens with no value or practical application. At the same time, their creators may claim enormous importance of their shitcoins for the community and the crypto industry. The word "shitcoin" was originally slang, but it has firmly entered common usage even among professional investors.

Shitcoins are a separate category in the cryptocurrency market. There are even special lists of shitcoins, such as the Shitcoin List on the Coinranking platform.

How to recognize shitcoins: key signs of useless coins

Shitcoins are not used anywhere

One of the main signs of shitcoins is the lack of fundamental value. Unlike significant cryptocurrencies, shitcoins have little or no real-world use cases that would ensure high demand for the asset.

To understand how and where a particular token will be used, it is necessary to study the project documentation carefully:

Whitepaper — the main document describing the technical specification of a crypto project, including its tokenomics;
Roadmap, which should describe the main stages of project development, including real use cases for its token;
Website with a large amount of information, a knowledge base, and documentation for developers. In addition, major crypto projects regularly publish news about plans and releases. Simple websites with vague and poor project descriptions may be signs of shitcoins.

If the listed documents contain minimal information about token use cases or are absent, this may be a clear sign of shitcoins. Any project that weighs the crypto market, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana, has its own Whitepaper and roadmap. Without clear goals, a crypto project is unlikely to have any development prospects.

Inactive community

If a token truly has potential, its community will actively discuss use cases and ways to develop the project. However, if the community is only interested in quick profits, once that goal is achieved, the project will have almost no active users left.

Community engagement and trading volume are closely related: when user activity is low, token liquidity follows suit. As of 2025, more than 1.8 million cryptocurrencies have become "dead" and stopped trading, and more than half of the projects launched in 2021 have already disappeared from the market.

Team anonymity

Another sign of shitcoins is the lack of information about the team. Often, shitcoin creators prefer to remain anonymous or use front persons.

There are only rare exceptions when anonymous teams have presented truly valuable cryptocurrencies to the community. Among well-known cryptocurrencies, this is the case, for example, with the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin (BTC), and the meme token Pepe (PEPE). The latter, despite being a regular memecoin, is among the top 50 leading cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

In other cases, especially when combined with different signs, the lack of information about the team is a red flag, and such a token can be considered a shitcoin. For example, in the case of the Squid token, which turned out to be a scam, nothing was known about the team, allowing the fraudulent developers to delete their websites and social media accounts and disappear quickly.

Exchanges and liquidity

These indicators are closely related. A listing on a major exchange such as Binance alone can attract tens or even hundreds of millions in liquidity* at the start of trading.

* Liquidity is the ability of an asset to be quickly bought or sold on the market at a price close to the market price.

In the context of cryptocurrencies:

High liquidity means a large number of buyers and sellers.
Trades can be executed quickly and with minimal price slippage.
The market is more resistant to sharp price fluctuations of a crypto asset.

Shitcoins, on the other hand, typically have low liquidity and are traded on only a few decentralized exchanges (DEXs). Liquidity is frequently several tens of thousands of dollars, and less often hundreds of thousands. In rare cases, shitcoins may be listed on low-liquidity, less well-known centralized crypto exchanges.

For example, although the Pepe meme token has an anonymous team of creators, the crypto asset is traded on major exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, OKX, ByBit, and Bitget.

Copying other projects

Often, shitcoin creators "imitate" successful crypto projects. For example, after the success of the PEPE meme token, many shitcoins emerged that copied or closely resembled the original asset.

Often, shitcoin developers do not even bother and almost completely copy the source code of original projects. The originality of a project's source code can easily be checked using anti-plagiarism services.

Inflated promises to investors

Shitcoin creators often focus not on the usefulness of their token but on the benefits investors can gain from investing in their crypto asset. If a user sees calls to invest in an asset promising large, quick "x's," it's most likely another shitcoin.

Indeed, at the beginning, due to low liquidity, the price of shitcoins can grow rapidly — in the crypto world, this is called a "pump." However, this price spike is almost always followed by a sharp collapse or "dump." Investing in shitcoins is extremely risky, as most of these assets lose 99% or more of their value in a matter of days or even hours.