Over Half of Crypto Tokens Dead: 2025 Sees 11.6M Failures

The data from CoinGecko paints a picture of a market that deteriorated with shocking speed. While annual project failures remained in the low six figures from 2021 to 2023, the situation escalated dramatically. Failures surged to approximately 1.38 million in 2024 before exploding to over 11.56 million in 2025. This means that the failures in 2025 alone accounted for a staggering 86.3% of all cryptocurrency project collapses recorded in the five-year period from 2021 to 2025. The combined failures from the first three years, by contrast, represented a mere 3.4% of the total.

The fourth quarter of 2025 was especially catastrophic. In just those three months, 7.7 million tokens failed, constituting 34.9% of all recorded project collapses. This period of intense failure coincided directly with the systemic shock of the October 10 liquidation cascade, where approximately $19 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out within 24 hours. This event, noted as the largest single-day deleveraging in crypto market history, created a wave of instability that proved fatal for millions of speculative tokens.

Paradoxically, the surge in failures occurred alongside an unprecedented explosion in the total number of cryptocurrency projects. The report shows the number of projects listed on GeckoTerminal grew from just 428,383 in 2021 to nearly 20.2 million by 2025. CoinGecko attributes this hyper-growth to the increasing ease of token creation, particularly through platforms known as launchpads.

The rise of platforms like the Solana-based meme coin launchpad Pump.fun is cited as a key driver. By significantly lowering the technical and financial barriers to entry, these tools enabled a flood of ‘low-effort meme coins and experimental projects.’ This democratization of token creation, while innovative, saturated the market with projects lacking sustainable utility or development, setting the stage for the massive failure rate witnessed in 2025 as market conditions tightened.

The scale of the 2025 token failures represents a sharp break from previous market cycles and indicates a new, more fragile phase for the cryptocurrency ecosystem. The data reveals a market increasingly dominated by short-lived, speculative ventures, particularly within the meme coin segment, whose survivability is acutely sensitive to volatility. The fact that over half of all tracked tokens are now dead underscores a fundamental issue of quality and sustainability amidst overwhelming quantity.

The CoinGecko report serves as a stark metric for the consequences of unbridled speculation and the risks inherent in a market where creation is effortless. The historic deleveraging event of October 10, 2025, acted not as a cause in isolation, but as a stress test that exposed the underlying weakness of a market saturated with millions of fragile tokens. As the total project count continues to climb, the survivability rate and the concentration of value in a shrinking pool of viable projects will be critical indicators for the health and maturity of the broader crypto market moving forward.