Before meme coin launchpads surged, crypto project failures remained relatively low.
More than half of all cryptocurrencies tracked on CoinGecko’s GeckoTerminal have now failed. Such a significant volume of collapse in token survivability is driven largely by excess speculation and market instability.
According to the crypto aggregator’s latest report, 53.2% of all cryptocurrencies listed on GeckoTerminal are classified as dead, and the majority of failures occurred in 2025.
Crypto Project Failures
Roughly 11.6 million tokens collapsed, which accounted for 86.3% of all cryptocurrency failures recorded between 2021 and 2025. The scale of the losses is a sharp break from previous years and indicates the growing fragility of a market increasingly saturated with short-lived projects, particularly within the meme coin segment.
CoinGecko stated that the fourth quarter of 2025 was especially destructive. During a period of these three months alone, there were 7.7 million tokens that failed, which represented 34.9% of all recorded project collapses. Interestingly, this surge in failures coincided with increased systemic stress following the October 10 liquidation cascade, when approximately $19 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out within 24 hours, which made it the largest single-day deleveraging event in crypto market history.
While market volatility intensified in 2025, the number of cryptocurrency projects continued to expand rapidly. The total number of projects listed on GeckoTerminal grew from just 428,383 in 2021 to nearly 20.2 million by 2025. The report attributed this explosive growth to the increasing ease of token creation via launchpads, which has lowered barriers to entry and encouraged a wave of low-effort meme coins and experimental projects.
Failure Rates Spiked After 2023
Yearly failure data revealed how sharply conditions deteriorated. In 2021, only 2,584 projects failed. The figure rose to 213,075 in 2022 and 245,049 in 2023. Failures accelerated significantly in 2024 and reached approximately 1.38 million before surging to more than 11.56 million in 2025.
Despite 2024 recording over 3 million new launches and the second-highest number of project closures, it still accounted for just 10.3% of total failures over the five years. CoinGecko found that before 2024, and before platforms such as Solana-based meme coin launchpad Pump.fun gained traction, annual crypto project failures remained in the low six figures, while the combined failures from 2021 to 2023 represented only 3.4% of all closures since 2021.
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