The crypto market’s obsession with rapid token creation has collided with reality. New data shows that 2025 marked the most destructive year on record for digital assets, with millions of projects disappearing almost as quickly as they were launched.
According to CoinGecko, over 11 million cryptocurrency tokens became inactive or collapsed in 2025 alone. That single year accounts for more than 86% of all crypto project failures recorded since 2021, underscoring how extreme the washout has become.
Key takeaways:
11.6 million crypto tokens failed in 2025, the highest annual total ever recorded
Meme coins were responsible for the majority of collapsed projects
Over half of all tokens listed since 2021 are now defunct
Most tokens launched in 2025 did not survive the year
Rather than being spread evenly across the market, the damage was highly concentrated. CoinGecko’s analysis, based on tokens listed on GeckoTerminal, shows that 53.2% of all cryptocurrencies tracked since 2021 are no longer active. Only projects that recorded at least one on-chain trade were included, meaning abandoned or fake listings were excluded from the count.
Meme coin factories fueled the collapse
The explosion — and implosion — of meme coins was the dominant factor behind the surge in failures. Automated launchpads such as pump.fun made it possible to create tokens in minutes, with no development work, utility, or long-term plan. While this dramatically increased experimentation, it also produced an overwhelming volume of low-effort projects that quickly lost liquidity.
CoinGecko noted that only pump.fun tokens that “graduated” beyond the platform were included, meaning the true number of failed meme coins is likely even higher. As speculative appetite faded, liquidity evaporated just as fast as it arrived.
The damage accelerated sharply in the final months of the year. Q4 2025 alone accounted for 7.7 million project failures, roughly 35% of all crypto collapses since 2021. That period coincided with a major market shock on October 10, when $19 billion in leveraged positions were liquidated in a single day, the largest deleveraging event in crypto history. Meme coins were hit hardest during that unwind.
Growth masked a historically high failure rate
Ironically, 2025 was also the year with the largest number of crypto projects ever created. Total listings on GeckoTerminal ballooned from just 428,383 projects in 2021 to nearly 20.2 million by the end of 2025. But the growth came with a brutal caveat: the majority of tokens launched in 2025 collapsed within the same year.
The data paints a clear picture of a market that shifted from innovation-driven experimentation to mass production of speculative assets with minimal staying power. While the crypto ecosystem continues to grow in raw numbers, survivability has collapsed — especially among meme-driven projects.
What 2025 ultimately revealed is that ease of creation does not translate into durability. As millions of tokens vanished, the market delivered a harsh reminder that liquidity, narrative, and momentum can create assets overnight — but sustaining them is far harder.
