In beginning of 2018 there were a lot of alcoins was launched in market, Most of them was just to scam people with typically referral method by social influencers.
This was also a flaw of Ethereum blockchain where any single person can create his own coin with his desired supply and name by costing very low fee.
As with the help of Ethereum blockchain where it was super easy to generate any coin it was easy to launch any ico with high promising goals and convince people to make their money multiple x.
Those scam or ordinary platform make alt market dirty game. And this impact very badly on the genion project where many traders lost their interest.