nah i mean it is a 99% decline form 100mio is extreme, most others fall form 10-4 to one mio (75-90% decline).
100mio to 1mio is a hole new scale. For this loss there must be happen something serious wrong.
The fairest amongst the reasons, would be to say the team over promised and under delivered. Others may say, a few members of the team are/were deluded, and full of shit.
The technology isn't bad, they just got caught with the problem lots of people get stuck on: Egos. The guys who made counterparty originally offered to help build mastercoin but they were rebuffed. Counterparty had it's moment to shine but thats past too. Divide and conquer really. Had only everyone gotten over their EGOS and tried working together.......
What they've built is good and usable. But when mastercoin was first announced there was no counterparty, no maidsafe, no etherum, basically nothing like this. Now the mastercoin technology is outdated already.
Honestly Mastercoin, and by extension counterparty, needs a true killer app. Sorry to say it, but it's not going to be financial services. When mastercoin was invented Banks didn't take bitcoin or blockchain technology seriously. Now however they do- and they have the research budgets to build their own implementations. No fortune 500 needs an open source project with no network effect. Look at Counterparty- Overstock took them on and then realized they could do it without them. There's zero chance someone is going to pick up Mastercoin with it's checkered history if they could just build their own. Not to mention there are a lot more blockchain developers today than when Mastercoin was invented- so it's not like the talent pool is concentrated only in these open source projects anymore. Indeed commercial entities have stolen the talent AWAY from the open source projects if anything.
So what we really need, and all of the Bitcoin 2.0 tech needs (an era that has already passed? because of lack of implementation or usefulness?) needs, is a killer app, but it's hard to imagine at this point what that app might be.