The figure marks a steep acceleration from 2024, when 1,382,010 projects were classified as failed, and highlights the fragile economics of a market flooded with easily created tokens, particularly meme coins. CoinGecko counted 11,564,909 failures in 2025, compared with 245,049 in 2023 and 213,075 in 2022.
CoinGecko defines a failed or “dead” cryptocurrency as a coin or token once listed on GeckoTerminal that is no longer actively traded. Its study covers data from July 1, 2021, through December 31, 2025, and includes only assets that recorded at least one trade before becoming inactive. Pump. fun tokens were counted only after they had “graduated” from the launch platform.
Across the full period, about 53.2% of cryptocurrencies tracked by GeckoTerminal had failed. The annual figures add up to roughly 13.4 million defunct projects, while the broader dataset covered about 25.2 million listings. CoinGecko recorded only 2,584 failures in 2021, illustrating how sharply attrition increased as token creation became easier.
The heaviest losses were concentrated in the final three months of 2025. CoinGecko said 7.7 million tokens failed during the fourth quarter alone, equivalent to 34.9% of all project failures measured in its analysis. The research linked the deterioration in token survival partly to market turbulence and severe pressure on the meme-coin segment.
That quarter also encompassed the October 10 liquidation cascade, when about $19 billion in leveraged cryptocurrency positions were wiped out within 24 hours. CoinGecko described the episode as the largest single-day deleveraging event in the market’s history and said the shock contributed to the sharp fourth-quarter rise in inactive projects.
The failure count nevertheless reflects more than a broad fall in cryptocurrency prices. Token issuance expanded rapidly over the same period. The number of cryptocurrency projects on GeckoTerminal rose from 428,383 in 2021 to more than 20.2 million by 2025, as launchpads lowered the technical and financial barriers to creating digital assets.
That expansion was particularly visible in meme coins, where token-launch services allowed users to create new assets quickly and with minimal technical expertise. CoinGecko said the resulting wave of low-effort projects helped swell the number of listings, while many lacked the liquidity, sustained trading activity or community support needed to remain active.
CoinGecko’s separate review of the meme-coin market found that the sector’s total market capitalisation had reached a record $150.6 billion in December 2024 before falling sharply during 2025. It stood at $47.2 billion in November, underscoring the scale of the reversal after speculative demand weakened.
The mortality figures require careful interpretation because CoinGecko’s methodology measures the end of active trading rather than bankruptcy, insolvency or the formal closure of a development team. A token may remain technically present on a blockchain even after trading has ceased, and the study does not establish that every inactive asset involved investor losses of the same scale.
The dataset also excludes tokens that never registered a trade. For projects launched through pump. fun, it excludes those that did not progress far enough to graduate to decentralised exchange trading. The reported failure rate therefore applies to the population defined by CoinGecko’s methodology rather than every token ever minted on a blockchain.
The year-by-year pattern shows how concentrated the attrition became. Failures recorded from 2021 through 2023 represented only 3.4% of the five-year total, while 2024 accounted for 10.3%. The overwhelming share came in 2025 as issuance remained elevated and market liquidity became less forgiving for lightly traded assets.
The comparison with 2024 is especially stark: the 2025 tally was more than eight times higher, even though the earlier year had already produced the second-largest failure count in CoinGecko’s five-year series up to then.
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