{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,14]],"date-time":"2026-08-14T16:26:47Z","timestamp":1786724807741,"version":"build-2736575974"},"posted":{"date-parts":[[2026]]},"group-title":"SSRN","reference-count":18,"publisher":"Elsevier BV","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":[],"abstract":"<jats:p>Across N=28,123 cryptocurrency tokens listed on CoinMarketCap between 2014 and 2024, we estimate empirical survival functions and document substantial heterogeneity by cohort and chain. Under a primary death definition that requires 180-day persistence at less than 1% of alltime-high price, less than $1,000 daily volume, and absence from CMC's top-2,000 ranking, the unconditional 5-year survival rate is 17.0%, robust to alternative operationalizations (range 11.3% to 22.4% across four definitions). In contrast, a re-implementation of the simplified Feder et al. (2018) volume-only definition on our panel yields 83.0% mortality, illustrating definitional sensitivity and motivating our preference for compound multi-criterion definitions. The Weibull shape parameter is 1.37, indicating that baseline mortality hazard increases with token agecontrary to the common intuition that tokens which survive their first year are subsequently safer. Cox proportional hazards regression with cohort, chain, and launch-feature controls achieves a concordance index of 0.72. Initial market capitalization has economically negligible effects on survival, while initial trading volume (HR=0.94 per log unit) and initial CMC rank (HR=1.62 per log unit) are economically meaningful predictors. Tokens deployed on Ethereum exhibit lower mortality (42.0%) than those on Solana (49.0%) or Binance Smart Chain (47.7%); cohort effects dominate, with the 2014H2-2017H2 vintages showing 80-95% mortality and the 2021H2 cohort already at 79% by Q4 2024. The findings empirically refute the widely-cited \"95% of cryptocurrencies will go to zero\" claim as a short-to-medium term prediction-the unconditional rate is closer to 60%-while supporting it asymptotically: cohorts that have aged beyond five years show survival rates between 5% and 20%.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.2139\/ssrn.6664638","type":"posted-content","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,28]],"date-time":"2026-04-28T05:39:16Z","timestamp":1777354756000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Token Mortality: A Survival Analysis of Cryptocurrency Cohorts, 2014-2024"],"prefix":"10.2139","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0005-8477-9393","authenticated-orcid":true,"given":"Boon Chuan","family":"Lim","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"78","reference":[{"key":"ref1","article-title":"Get ready for most cryptocurrencies to hit zero","author":"Bloomberg","year":"2018","journal-title":"Goldman Sachs says"},{"key":"ref2","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","DOI":"10.3386\/w30783","author":"L W Cong","year":"2022","journal-title":"Crypto wash trading. 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