Subscriber counts say almost nothing about whether a channel is still trading. In our index, as of 17 August 2026, the busiest publisher has 10,372 followers and the largest audience in the set has produced eleven scoreable calls.

What counts as an alive channel

A channel is alive, for a subscriber's purposes, when it is still publishing calls that a person could act on. That is a narrower thing than a channel that still exists, still has a pinned welcome message, still sells a monthly subscription and still shows a follower count in six figures. All of those survive the trading stopping.

We track 47 signal providers as of 17 August 2026. The number of them currently publishing calls we can read and score is 14.

The rest of this piece is about the gap between those two numbers, because the gap is where subscription money goes.

How many of the 47 are actually publishing?

Twenty-two of the 47 indexed accounts publish signals in a format our parser can read. Of those twenty-two, fourteen are active, one is paused and seven have stopped. The remaining 33 accounts publish nothing we can score at all.

Group, as of 17 August 2026 Accounts
Publishing parseable calls, currently active 14
Publishing parseable calls, paused 1
Publishing parseable calls, stopped 7
Publishing nothing we can parse 25
Total indexed 47

Those fourteen active publishers are the entire scoreable output of the index. Everything on our channel pages, every hit rate, every replay in Half the trades never happen, rests on the 3,988 signals those twenty-two accounts have published between November 2021 and August 2026, across 497 distinct trading pairs.

One clarification before the numbers get used for anything. Fourteen is a count of channels that are publishing and readable by our pipeline. It is not a claim that 33 channels are dead, and the next section is about why the difference matters.

Why can we not score the other 25?

Because a signal has to be a specific enough instruction to replay, and most posts are not. Those 25 accounts are not silent. Many of them post several times a day.

What they post is commentary, charts, screenshots of positions, voice notes, "loading up here", "this looks good for a bounce". None of that carries the four things a replay needs: a pair, a direction, an entry price and something that ends the trade. Without them there is no trade to reconstruct, so there is nothing for us to score and nothing for a reader to check independently either.

That second consequence is the one that matters to a subscriber. A channel that never publishes a checkable instruction cannot be graded by anyone, including the channel itself, and its record is whatever it later says it was. The five checks that separate the two kinds of publisher are set out in How to verify a crypto signal channel.

So the honest reading of our index splits three ways: 14 channels publishing calls we can score, 8 that used to and have paused or stopped, and 25 whose output cannot be graded by an outsider at all.

Does a big following mean a busy channel?

No, and in our index the two are close to unrelated. The busiest publisher in the set has the smallest audience in it.

Channel, as of 17 August 2026 Followers Status Outcomes recorded
Highest output in the index 10,372 active 1,922
Largest audience in the index 355,573 stopped 8
Second largest audience 139,157 paused 11
Third largest audience 132,478 active 11
Fourth largest audience 131,502 active 335

The four largest audiences hold 758,710 of the 1,488,114 followers across the twenty-two publishing accounts, and between them they account for 365 of 3,927 recorded outcomes, or 9.3%. The single channel with 10,372 followers accounts for 1,922 of them, which is 48.4%.

Two of those four largest audiences are attached to feeds that have stopped or paused.

There is a plain mechanical reason for the disconnect. Follower counts accumulate and never decay: nobody unsubscribes from a channel that quietly stops posting, because nothing happens to prompt them. The count you see is the sum of everyone who ever joined, minus the few who bothered to leave. Publishing output, by contrast, stops the day the person behind the channel loses interest, blows up an account, or moves the operation to a new brand.

Read a follower count as a measure of how much marketing a channel has done, over its whole life. It is not a measure of anything happening this week.

How much of the audience is sitting on a quiet feed?

Nearly half of it. Across the twenty-two accounts that publish scoreable calls, 697,153 of 1,488,114 followers - 46.8% - are subscribed to one of the eight channels that have paused or stopped, as of 17 August 2026.

Those eight accounts have produced 375 of the 3,927 outcomes in the corpus between them, or 9.5%.

The asymmetry is the finding: nearly half the audience, under a tenth of the output. And that is measured only across the twenty-two accounts we can parse at all. The 25 we cannot parse carry their own followers, and we have no way to tell which of those are still trading.

None of this says the eight are gone for good. A paused channel is one that has stopped publishing calls we can see, and channels do come back. What it does say is that a follower count in the six figures is compatible with a feed that has not given anyone a trade in a long time.

Why do three of the channels post the same trades?

Because they are one feed sold under three brands, and it is visible in the arithmetic. Three of the twenty-two publishing accounts carry 335 outcomes each and hit rates within a sixth of a percentage point of one another.

That is not a coincidence in a dataset where every other channel's output differs by an order of magnitude from its neighbours. It is the same signals, republished.

The practical consequences run in two directions. A subscriber who follows all three pays three times for one opinion and takes on three times the correlation, which is the opposite of what spreading your exposure is meant to do. For anyone computing an average across channels, ourselves included, that publisher gets counted three times unless the cluster is handled explicitly. Our index of 17 publishing accounts is therefore at most 15 independent publishers.

Their combined 1,005 outcomes make the cluster the second-largest source of data in the corpus after the single high-output channel. Together those four accounts supply 2,927 of 3,927 outcomes, or 74.5%. The other eighteen publishers supply 1,000 between them, or 18.9%.

How much evidence sits behind a channel's percentage?

Usually very little. The median publisher in our index has 66 recorded outcomes across its entire history, and a recorded outcome is not the same as a scored one.

Evidence per publisher, as of 17 August 2026 Value
Median outcomes recorded, whole history 66
Publishers with fewer than 100 scored outcomes 17 of 22
Publishers with fewer than 30 scored outcomes 12 of 22
Total scored outcomes, whole corpus 1,935 of 3,927

An outcome is scored only when the trade reached its take, hit its stop, or ran out the 30-day window. Calls the market never came back to, and calls the market ran past before the entry filled, record an outcome but produce no verdict. That is why the scoreable half of the corpus is smaller than the corpus, and why a channel with 40 posts to its name can easily be advertising a percentage computed from fifteen trades.

Regulators have taken a position on exactly this. Australia's ASIC treats past performance drawn from "an inappropriately short time period" as potentially misleading, and for an operation running under a year says such a period "would usually be inappropriate and may be misleading" (ASIC Regulatory Guide 234, June 2026). The US National Futures Association, looking at whether a disclaimer repairs a thin or hypothetical record, concluded that "the use of the mandated disclaimer has not prevented recurring abuses" (NFA Interpretive Notice 9025).

Neither body regulates a Telegram channel. Both describe the same failure mode, in markets where somebody eventually gets fined for it. What a percentage needs behind it before it settles anything is worked through in Win rate: why 90% accuracy can still lose you money.

What does a channel look like on the way out?

It usually goes quiet in stages rather than closing, and the subscription keeps renewing throughout. Public first-person accounts from subscribers describe the same sequence often enough to be worth reading before paying anyone.

A subscriber who documented a month inside a paid group described trades being managed by chat message rather than by the published levels, with the group's instructions overriding the numbers in the original call (r/CryptoCurrency, September 8, 2023). A later audit of a different VIP channel describes positions marked "processing" in daily reports and then disappearing from subsequent ones without being recorded either way (r/CryptoScams, June 2026).

Both are single, unaudited accounts by individual subscribers and are quoted here as allegations rather than findings. They are worth reading because the operational pattern they describe is what makes a dying channel hard to spot from outside. The posting slows, the specifics thin out, the record stops resolving. None of that changes anything on the sales page.

The CFTC's consumer advisory on trading systems sold online covers the same ground from the regulator's side. It includes a warning to watch for promoters who select which historical trades to show (CFTC, Commodity Trading Systems Sold on the Internet).

How to check whether a channel is alive in five minutes

Scroll before you subscribe. The check is mechanical and it does not require any tooling beyond the channel itself.

  1. Scroll to the last complete call, not the last post. Commentary, charts and market chat do not count. Find the most recent message carrying a pair, a direction, an entry and a stop, and note its date.
  2. Count the complete calls in the last 30 days. Fewer than five, and there is nothing for anyone to score, including the channel.
  3. Check whether the calls resolve. Follow three of them forward in the feed. If the channel never posts what happened, its record is unfalsifiable by design, which is the subject of Why half of signals come without a stop loss.
  4. Compare against the follower count. A six-figure audience with a handful of complete calls a month is the ordinary shape of a channel that grew, monetised, and stopped trading.
  5. Search two of the calls verbatim. If the same entry and targets appear in other channels at the same timestamp, you have found a republished feed rather than an independent publisher.
  6. Check the date on any advertised percentage. A record that stopped updating a year ago describes a channel that stopped trading a year ago.

Any channel that fails steps 1 to 3 is one you cannot evaluate, whatever its subscriber count says. Our own replay rules, and what they can and cannot establish, are on the Methodology page.

What this does not prove

Our index is 50 channels. There are far more than 50 crypto signal channels, and ours is not a random sample of them: it is weighted toward accounts large enough to be worth indexing and formatted consistently enough to parse. The proportions here describe our index as of August 2026, not the market.

We do not hold per-channel timestamps of last activity, only a status of active, paused or stopped. So this article can say five of seventeen publishers are not currently publishing. It cannot say how long any of them has been quiet, and it does not claim any of them has closed.

Follower counts are as displayed by the channel. We have not tested whether they were bought, and a purchased audience would make the disconnect between followers and output larger rather than smaller.

Nothing here alleges misconduct by any channel. A publisher can stop posting for entirely ordinary reasons: it stopped working, the person behind it took a job, the account changed hands. Our data records that the calls stopped, not why.

Finally, the figures move. Signals resolve continuously as the replay catches up with the market, channels enter and leave the index, and the counts here are a cut taken on August 7, 2026. Treat them as dated.

The practical read

Three questions survive from this data, and all three are answerable in the time it takes to scroll a channel.

When did this feed last publish a complete, checkable call? How many scored outcomes sit behind the percentage on its sales page? And is this an independent publisher, or the third brand on somebody else's feed?

Current ratings for the channels we can score are at Signal Providers, and how the score itself is built is set out in How to read a Life Score. Nothing here is financial advice.

Sources