Greater than 3.7 million cryptocurrency tokens have failed since 2021, with almost half of these collapses occurring through the Pump.fun-driven memecoin craze.
Hundreds of thousands of tokens have failed since 2021, with almost half of these collapses recorded in 2024 and early 2025, in line with new analysis by crypto pricing platform GeckoTerminal.
Based on the analysis, a complete of 1.8 million tokens failed in Q1 this 12 months alone, making up 49.7% of all token failures recorded between 2021 and 2025. In 2024, almost 1.4 million initiatives additionally went underneath, accounting for 37.7% of failures. Collectively, the 2 years noticed a lot of the crypto market’s token shutdowns.
“This sharp decline in token survivability could also be linked to broader market turbulence, significantly following Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, which coincided with a downturn within the crypto market.”
GeckoTerminal
The variety of new crypto initiatives has additionally surged. As an example, simply over 428,000 tokens have been listed on crypto worth aggregator platforms in 2021. By 2025, that quantity had jumped to just about seven million. The researchers say a lot of this progress “may be attributed to the launch of Pump.enjoyable, which simplified the method of making tokens, resulting in a flood of meme cash and low-effort initiatives coming into the market.”
Earlier than Pump.enjoyable launched in 2024, the variety of challenge failures was considerably decrease. From 2021 to 2023, failures remained within the low six digits. Mixed, these three years accounted for simply 12.6% of complete token deaths, the info reveals.
GeckoTerminal defined that it defines “lifeless tokens” as these that are now not actively traded, noting that solely tokens that had “one commerce or extra” earlier than going defunct have been thought of.
