Dead Coins: Over 50% of Cryptocurrencies Have Failed

How Many Crypto Coins Have Died?

53.2% of all cryptocurrencies on GeckoTerminal have failed, with the majority occurring in 2025 itself. In 2025 alone, 11.6 million tokens failed, representing a large majority of token failures, or 86.3%.

This sharp decline in token survivability may be linked to the broader market turbulence throughout the year, which particularly affected the memecoin sector. 

Alarmingly, the fourth quarter of 2025 alone saw the collapse of 7.7 million tokens, making up 34.9% of all recorded project failures. This sharp decline in token survivability is largely attributed to the systemic turbulence following the October 10 "liquidation cascade." During this record-breaking event, $19 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out in 24 hours, marking the largest single-day deleveraging in crypto history.

Despite the turbulent crypto market in 2025, the total number of cryptocurrency projects has skyrocketed. In 2021, 428,383 projects were listed on GeckoTerminal. However, by 2025, that number had ballooned to nearly 20.2 million projects. The ease of launching tokens on launchpads has led to a surge in low-effort meme coins and projects entering the market. 

86.3% of All Crypto Coin Failures Happened in 2025

As of December 31, 2025, 11.6 million cryptocurrency projects have failed, the highest number of failures recorded in a single year. These failures account for 86.3% of all project closures between 2021 and 2025. 

This is followed by 2024, which saw nearly 1.4 million projects fail, accounting for 10.3% of all failures in the past five years. It also saw the second-highest number of launches, with over 3.0 million new projects coming to market. Before the launch of pump.fun in 2024, cryptocurrency failures numbered in the low six digits. Project failures between 2021 and 2023 made up just 3.4% of all cryptocurrency failures over the past five years.

Cryptocurrency Failures by Year

The number of cryptocurrency failures by year, between 2021 and 2025, are:

Methodology

This study examines the total number of coins and tokens, collectively termed as ‘cryptocurrencies’, once listed on GeckoTerminal that are no longer actively traded (‘dead’ or ‘failed’), grouped by the year they last had an active trade. Data was taken between July 1, 2021 and December 31, 2025.

Only tokens that had one trade or more before going defunct were considered. Meanwhile, only pump.fun tokens which have ‘graduated’, were included in the study.

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Curious to find out more about our previous research studies? Check out this one we did on the Most Popular Blockchain Ecosystems.