For sure it can go wrong, nothing is protected from failures. Especially, if a project has a real use case, but greedy management, bad community and poor roadmap. There are more important things that a working product.
For a project to be successful everything needs to go right, a project that the only thing that has going for it is its use case does not really have anything.
The developers need to have the abilities to make the project a success, even something as basic as the chemistry between the team members is critical since I have seen some projects failing precisely for that reason, they also need to set realistic goals if they do not then the community will get restless and may sell their coins and stop their support to the project.