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Over half of crypto tokens have failed as speculation surges: CoinGecko
TL;DR
More than half of the cryptocurrencies tracked on CoinGecko’s GeckoTerminal are no longer active, highlighting the growing instability of a market flooded with speculative and short-lived projects.
In its latest report, CoinGecko revealed that 53.2% of all listed tokens are now considered dead. Most of these failures occurred in 2025, marking a dramatic shift in project survivability compared with earlier years.
The data shows that approximately 11.6 million tokens collapsed between 2021 and 2025, accounting for more than 86% of all recorded crypto project failures during that period. CoinGecko attributes this surge largely to speculative behavior and the rapid rise of low-effort projects, particularly within the meme coin sector.
The final quarter of 2025 proved especially damaging. In just three months, around 7.7 million tokens failed, representing nearly 35% of all project closures on record. This wave of collapses coincided with broader market stress following the Oct. 10 liquidation event, when roughly $19 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out in a single day.
Despite the growing number of failures, the total number of crypto projects continued to expand rapidly. Tokens listed on GeckoTerminal increased from just over 428,000 in 2021 to nearly 20.2 million by 2025. CoinGecko pointed to the rise of token launchpads, which have made it easier than ever to create new assets, fueling a flood of experimental tokens and meme coins with limited longevity.
Historical data highlights how sharply failure rates accelerated after 2023. Only 2,584 projects failed in 2021, rising to 213,075 in 2022 and 245,049 in 2023. Closures jumped to about 1.38 million in 2024 before exploding to more than 11.5 million in 2025 alone.
While 2024 saw more than 3 million new launches and a high number of shutdowns, it still accounted for just over 10% of total failures since 2021. CoinGecko noted that prior to the rise of meme coin launchpads such as Pump.fun, annual crypto project failures remained relatively contained, making up only a small fraction of today’s cumulative total.
