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.
Well, truth be told scam projects keeps making the altcoin market look as if it is not worth getting closer to, also not only scam projects that is, those that exited scam but other projects which are of no value, for pump and dump etc, although one can also liken them to scam. But, however, even at this ugly situation, when looking at the likes of ETH, XLM etc one can say in affirmative that not all altcoins are bad there are few out there still contributing to the growth of this space. Also, scam projects can be launched on any blockchain, that Ethereum was mostly used doesn't mean it is at fault, at least there are other scam projects which were launched on XLM blockchain.