More than 53% of all cryptocurrencies tracked by have failed since 2021, with 2025 alone accounting for 11.6 million collapsed tokens — or 86.3% of all recorded project failures.
What Happened: Crypto Collapse Data
The study, which analyzed cryptocurrency projects listed on GeckoTerminal between Jul. 1, 2021, and Dec. 31, 2025, found the fourth quarter of 2025 particularly devastating.
Some 7.7 million tokens collapsed during that three-month period, representing 34.9% of all failures.
Researchers attributed much of this decline to the Oct. 10 "liquidation cascade," when $19 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out within 24 hours — the largest single-day deleveraging event in crypto history.
The total number of cryptocurrency projects exploded from 428,383 in 2021 to nearly 20.2 million by 2025, a surge CoinGecko linked to the ease of launching tokens on launchpads.
Before pump.fun launched in 2024, annual project failures numbered in the low six digits; 2024 saw nearly 1.4 million failures (10.3% of the five-year total), while 2021 through 2023 combined accounted for just 3.4%.
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Why It Matters: Market Sustainability
The findings raise questions about the sustainability of the current token ecosystem.
The memecoin sector bore the brunt of 2025's market turbulence, with low-effort projects flooding exchanges only to collapse when conditions deteriorated.
CoinGecko's methodology counted only tokens that recorded at least one trade before going defunct, and only pump.fun tokens that had "graduated" were included — suggesting the actual failure rate could be higher.
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