Vaporware (aka Vapourware)

Vaporware describes a product that is publicly announced with great fanfare but is never actually delivered, gets released only in a crippled form, or quietly disappears without an official cancellation. The word predates crypto by decades: it was coined inside Microsoft in the early 1980s to describe software that had been promised but stopped being developed, and it entered wider tech journalism a few years later to mock the industry's habit of hyping products long before they were ready to ship.

In crypto, vaporware takes on a sharper edge because it is often tied directly to fundraising. A team publishes a whitepaper and an ambitious roadmap describing a groundbreaking protocol, sells tokens or runs an ICO on the strength of that pitch, and then either never ships a working product or ships something far less capable than what was promised. Unlike traditional software vaporware, where a company risks its reputation but investors typically lose nothing, crypto vaporware usually means token holders have already paid real money for a promise.

• Warning signs include vague or repeatedly slipping roadmaps, no working testnet or demo months after launch, and marketing that emphasizes price and partnerships over technical progress.
• Vaporware sits on a spectrum: some projects are simply over-ambitious and underdeliver, while others are deliberately deceptive from the start.

Outright fraudulent vaporware, where developers never intended to build anything, overlaps heavily with the more colloquial crypto term shitcoin, though vaporware specifically emphasizes the gap between promise and delivery rather than the token's overall quality or intent.