Over the past year, more than 11.6 million tokens have failed. Analysts at CoinGecko attribute this record "mortality" rate to the volatility and collapse of the meme coin sector.
INSIGHT: 11.6 million crypto tokens failed in 2025 alone ☠️
— CoinGecko (@coingecko) January 15, 2026
What tokens do you think will succeed in 2026? pic.twitter.com/w90YIdNuf9
According to the study, the total number of failed projects has reached 53.2% of all cryptocurrencies ever tracked by GeckoTerminal.
The peak occurred in the fourth quarter of 2025 following an October crash, during which 7.7 million coins "died," accounting for 34.9% of the failures recorded by analysts.
Absolute Record Low
The past year set a record low, with 86.3% of failures occurring between 2021 and 2025.
“Such a sharp decline in ‘survivability’ may be linked to the overall market turbulence throughout the year, which particularly affected the meme coin sector,” experts suggested.
In comparison, the number of "dead" coins in 2024 was 1.3 million, while in 2023 it was 245,049.
Despite the mass failures, the total number of crypto projects continued to grow rapidly:
- 2021 — 428,383;
- 2025 — 20.2 million.
CoinGecko explained this trend by the ease of launching tokens through specialized platforms like Pump.fun, which led to an explosion of low-quality meme coins and other speculative tokens.
The record for the number of new cryptocurrencies remains with 2024, when over 3 million projects were launched.
As a reminder, at the end of December, CoinGecko experts identified the most profitable sectors in the crypto market, with the RWA segment taking the top spot.