More than half of all crypto tokens launched since mid-2021 are no longer actively traded, according to a CoinGecko analysis based on GeckoTerminal listings. Out of nearly 20.2 million tokens that entered the market through the end of 2025, 53.2% have gone inactive. The largest share of those failures came in 2025.
The study counted projects that had logged at least one active trade before falling silent. By that measure, about 11.6 million token failures were recorded in 2025 alone, representing 86.3% of all token deaths over the past five years. The contrast with earlier years is sharp: only 2,584 projects failed in 2021, while the number rose to more than 1.3 million in 2024 before surging in 2025.
Launchpads lowered the barrier for token creation
CoinGecko analyst Shaun Paul Lee said one major driver was the flood of low-effort memecoins and experimental projects launched through crypto launchpads such as pump.fun. With token creation becoming easier and cheaper, markets were filled with speculative assets that had little or no real development behind them. Many of them disappeared after only a handful of trades.
Q4 2025 marked the steepest collapse
The weakest period came in the fourth quarter of 2025. In just three months, about 7.7 million tokens failed, equal to roughly 35% of all crypto project failures recorded since 2021. That wave 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 biggest deleveraging event in crypto history, hitting a market that was already crowded with short-term speculative bets.
The figures show how quickly crypto’s open-access structure can turn into saturation. Launching a token became easy; staying active became much harder, and 2025 made that gap impossible to miss.