Top 500 crypto: ranks 401 to 500, live

"It's only a few cents. How much lower can it go?"

That thought has cost more people more money than almost any other in crypto, and the coins on this page are where it gets tested hardest. Ranks 401 to 500 are the last stretch of the top 500 crypto list, home to genuine early projects alongside tokens that were never meant to last. Each bubble is one of them, sized and colored by how it's trading right now. The aim of this page is to help you tell those groups apart before the chart does it for you.

Penny crypto, and why cheap isn't the same as small

Penny crypto usually means coins priced at a cent or less, and plenty of them sit in this range. The low price says almost nothing about value. A coin at $0.002 with tens of billions of tokens in circulation can be worth more than one at $40, and the only number that captures that is market cap. If that idea is new, the top 100 page's section on small cap crypto is a good place to start, since it sets out how cap sizes are measured.

What matters at rank 450 is that the coin is small in every sense: usually worth somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars and traded on a handful of venues. That makes it cheap to move, and cheap to fake demand for.

Crypto pump and dump schemes, and how they work

A crypto pump and dump is a coordinated scheme to push a small coin's price up quickly and sell into the buying, leaving latecomers holding the losses. The classic version runs through Telegram or Discord groups. Organizers buy quietly first, announce the coin to the group at a set time, members pile in, and the organizers sell to them within minutes.

Academic studies have tracked thousands of these group pumps since 2018, and they almost always target coins like the ones here: small enough to move and quiet enough that nobody else is watching. The influencer version is newer and slower. In December 2022, US regulators charged eight social media influencers over an alleged scheme that made around $100 million by promoting stocks they were secretly selling, and the same playbook turns up regularly in crypto.

On the crypto bubbles chart, a pump looks like one small bubble suddenly swelling and turning bright green while everything around it stays still. Real news can do that too. A pump usually fades within hours, and the volume behind it collapses as fast as it arrived. I treat any small coin that triples in an hour with no news as a pump until something proves otherwise.

"Pump and dump" is much older than crypto. In the 1990s, brokerages like Stratton Oakmont ran it on penny stocks over the phone, cold-calling investors to buy shares the firm was about to sell; one of its founders later became the subject of The Wolf of Wall Street (a better film than it was an investment strategy). The phones have been swapped for group chats. The script is the same.

Rug pull crypto: what it means, and the two kinds

A rug pull is when the people behind a crypto project take the money and leave. The name comes from pulling the rug out from under someone, and the meaning is about that literal.

The hard version happens in code. Developers drain the liquidity pool, mint a flood of new tokens and sell them, or build in a function that stops anyone else from selling. The Squid Game token in November 2021 is the textbook case: it shot up thousands of percent on the back of the Netflix show, holders found they couldn't sell, and the developers cashed out about $3 million before the price went to nearly zero.

The soft version is slower and harder to prove. The team keeps the project running in name while quietly selling its own allocation and posting less often, until it goes silent. Nothing in the code is malicious. The money still leaves.

Most rug pulls happen in brand-new tokens long before they reach any ranking, and they cluster around the newest hype cycle, which lately has meant meme launches; if you're unclear what is a meme coin and why that category attracts so many of them, that page covers it. A coin that has made it into the top 500 has usually survived the first and easiest rug. It hasn't necessarily survived the soft one.

Dead coins, and where they end up

A dead coin is one that still technically exists but has lost its team and almost all of its trading, with little prospect of getting either back. Sites like Coinopsy keep running lists of them, thousands long, with notes on how each one died. CoinGecko's own research in 2025 found that more than half of the tokens tracked on its decentralized exchange data since 2021 had already stopped trading.

Coins on this page are closer to that edge than anything ranked above them. They rarely die overnight. They die by drifting: volume thins, exchanges drop them, the crypto liquidity behind the price disappears, and the bubble shrinks a little every week until it falls out of the top 500 altogether. Some come back. Not many.

What happens to your coins when a project dies

The tokens don't vanish. They stay in your wallet or exchange account, showing a value that may be close to zero or may be a number nobody could actually sell at. If the coin is delisted from an exchange you hold it on, you may have a window to withdraw it to a wallet; after that, it can become stuck.

In many countries a total loss on a crypto investment can count against taxable gains, but the rules vary a lot and some require proof the asset is truly worthless. That's a question for a tax adviser where you live, not a bubble chart.

The more useful step comes before any of this. On coins this small, sizing a position as if it could go to zero is just realism, and a meme coin profit calculator works as well for running that downside as it does the upside. If losing the whole stake would hurt, the stake is too big for this part of the market. The same holds one tier up among the micro cap crypto coins, only slightly less so.

The cryptocurrencies ranked 501 to 600 on the next page go further down the list.