So, like, more than 3.7 million cryptocurrency tokens have totally failed since 2021, with almost half of those just crashing and burning during the whole Pump.fun-driven memecoin craze.
According to new research by the crypto pricing platform GeckoTerminal, a crazy number of tokens have been kicking the bucket since 2021, with nearly half of those collapses happening in 2024 and early 2025.
The research shows that a grand total of 1.8 million tokens were totally gone in Q1 of this year alone, making up like 49.7% of all the token failures that went down between 2021 and 2025. In 2024, almost 1.4 million projects also bit the dust, accounting for about 37.7% of all the failures. So, like, most of the dead tokens were just happening in those two years, you know?
“This whole drop in token survivability might be linked to some broader market turbulence, especially after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, which just happened to be around the same time the crypto market took a nosedive,” said GeckoTerminal.
The number of new crypto projects has also been on the rise. For example, in 2021, only a little over 428,000 tokens were listed on crypto price aggregator platforms. But by 2025, that number had gone up to like nearly seven million. The researchers are saying that a big chunk of this growth can totally be credited to the launch of Pump.fun, which, you know, made it super easy to create tokens and led to a flood of meme coins and other low-effort projects entering the market.
Before Pump.fun came onto the scene in 2024, the number of project failures was way lower. From 2021 to 2023, the failures were like pretty low, staying in the six digits. All three of those years combined only accounted for about 12.6% of all the token deaths, according to the data.
GeckoTerminal explained that they’re calling these tokens “dead” if they’re no longer actively traded, and only tokens that had at least “one trade or more” before becoming defunct were considered. So, like, it’s pretty clear that a whole bunch of tokens are just not making it in the crypto world, you know?
So, that’s the deal with all these failed cryptocurrency tokens, with millions just going down the drain since 2021. It’s like a wild crypto rollercoaster out there, with projects booming and then busting all over the place. Who knows what’s next in this crazy digital currency universe?
