coindesk.com
More than half of all cryptocurrencies ever launched are now defunct, with most failures occurring in 2025, according to a new analysis by CoinGecko.
The study looked at token listings on GeckoTerminal between mid-2021 and the end of 2025. Of the nearly 20.2 million tokens that entered the market during that period, 53.2% are no longer actively traded. A staggering 11.6 million of those failures happened in 2025 alone — accounting for 86.3% of all token deaths over the past five years.
One key driver behind the surge in dead tokens was the rise of low-effort memecoins and experimental projects launched via crypto launchpads like pump.fun, CoinGecko analyst Shaun Paul Lee said. These platforms lowered the barrier to entry for token creation, leading to a wave of speculative assets with little or no development backing. Many of these tokens never made it past a handful of trades before disappearing.
The fourth quarter of 2025 marked a low point. In just three months, 7.7 million tokens failed — about 35% of all crypto project failures since 2021. That collapse closely followed the October 10 “liquidation cascade,” when $19 billion in leveraged crypto positions were wiped out in a single day. Lee described it as the largest deleveraging event in crypto history, and it rattled markets that were already overexposed to short-term bets.
To put the scale in perspective, only 2,584 projects failed in 2021. That number climbed to over 1.3 million in 2024 before exploding in 2025. The data, which counted projects that had at least one active trade before going silent, shows how quickly crypto’s open-access design can lead to market saturation.