The crypto market’s “survival rate” got a brutal reality check in 2025. A new CoinGecko Research study found that 11.6 million tokens failed in 2025 alone, and meme coins were hit the hardest as sentiment flipped from risk-on to risk-off.
That headline number is shocking, but it’s also a window into how the token economy changed in 2024–2025: launching a token became nearly frictionless, the market got flooded, and when volatility spiked, millions of ultra-thin, hype-driven projects simply stopped trading.
Below is a news-based breakdown of what the data says, what “failed” really means here, and why meme coins absorbed the biggest blow.
The key stat: 11.6M crypto projects failed in 2025
CoinGecko reports that 53.2% of all cryptocurrencies tracked on GeckoTerminal have failed, with the majority of those failures happening in 2025. In raw terms, CoinGecko lists 11,564,909 “dead coins” in 2025, far above 2024’s ~1.38 million, and dwarfing the low six-figure failure counts seen earlier in the decade.
Even more striking: CoinGecko notes that Q4 2025 alone accounted for 7.7 million token failures, meaning the collapse accelerated sharply into the year’s final stretch.
What does “failed crypto project” actually mean in this report?
This is important for accuracy (and to avoid misunderstanding the headline).
CoinGecko’s methodology defines “dead” or “failed” as tokens that were once listed and actively traded on GeckoTerminal but are no longer actively traded, grouped by the year they last had an active trade. The dataset spans July 1, 2021 to December 31, 2025.
A few key methodological details from the study:
- Only tokens with at least one trade before going inactive were counted.
- For tokens created via Pump.fun, CoinGecko counted only those that had “graduated.”
So, this “failure” measure is not a legal declaration of shutdown or fraud. It is primarily a market-activity definition: the token effectively “dies” when trading dries up.
Why meme coins were hit hardest
CoinGecko explicitly links the sharp decline in survivability to broader market turbulence that “particularly affected the memecoin sector.”
That tracks with how meme coins usually work:
1) Meme coins are sentiment products first, “projects” second
Many meme tokens have minimal fundamentals outside trading, no fee model, no revenue stream, no necessity to hold the token, and no reason for liquidity to stick around once attention shifts. When risk appetite is strong, that’s fine. When conditions tighten, the weakest narratives get abandoned fastest.
2) Liquidity is shallow, and shallow liquidity breaks first
Meme coins often live on DEX liquidity that can be thin and fragile. When markets turn, spreads widen, traders disappear, and tokens with limited holders or weak distribution can fall into inactivity quickly, especially if there’s no ongoing community push or utility to keep trading alive.
3) Meme coin “supply shock” in 2024–2025
The other big driver wasn’t just fear, it was volume. CoinGecko notes total projects listed on GeckoTerminal rose from 428,383 in 2021 to nearly 20.2 million by 2025.
When millions of low-effort tokens enter the market, most won’t survive, especially after a major volatility event.
The October 10 liquidation cascade: the accelerant that turned stress into mass failure
CoinGecko and other reporting around the study point to the October 10, 2025 market shock as a key catalyst. CoinGecko describes an event in which $19 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out in 24 hours, calling it a record-scale deleveraging moment that helped drive the Q4 collapse.
Independent analysis from FTI Consulting similarly highlights that on October 10, 2025, more than $19 billion of crypto leverage was liquidated in roughly a day, framing it as the start of a broader sell-off and showing how leverage and liquidity dynamics can spiral under stress.
When that kind of deleveraging hits:
- speculative liquidity retreats,
- market makers widen spreads or step away,
- and “long-tail” tokens (where meme coins dominate) become the first casualties.
That’s how you get a quarter like Q4 2025, where CoinGecko recorded 7.7 million failures.
Launchpads made token creation too easy, and the market couldn’t digest it
A central theme across the coverage is that low-barrier launchpads amplified both the boom and the bust.
CoinGecko points to the “ease of launching tokens on launchpads” as a reason the market was flooded with low-effort meme coins.
One frequently cited example is Pump.fun, a Solana-based memecoin launchpad that helped mainstream “one-click token creation.” Cointelegraph coverage of the CoinGecko study notes Pump.fun’s launch as a driver behind the explosion in token listings.
And by mid-2025, signs of demand cooling showed up in platform economics: Cointelegraph reported Pump.fun’s monthly revenue fell to a 2025 low in July, citing DefiLlama data.
What does “graduated” mean in this context?
CoinGecko counted only Pump.fun tokens that “graduated.”
In Pump.fun’s ecosystem, “graduation” generally refers to tokens moving beyond the initial launch mechanism into regular AMM trading (i.e., leaving the launch phase and becoming tradable like other DEX tokens).
The bigger point: when token creation is frictionless, failure becomes normal. A market can’t sustainably support millions of new tokens unless there’s massive and persistent demand, which is exactly what disappears in a risk-off environment.
Not every “failed token” is a scam, but the churn is still a red flag
It’s tempting to read “11.6 million failures” as “11.6 million frauds.” That’s not what the dataset claims.
This is a trading-activity lens: many tokens likely died because:
- creators stopped posting,
- communities vanished,
- liquidity providers withdrew,
- or attention moved to the next trend.
Still, the number highlights a structural issue: the token market has become extremely disposable, especially in meme-heavy segments. Even if many of these projects were “jokes,” the scale of churn can distort discovery, overwhelm users, and raise the odds that newcomers get burned by hype cycles.
What this says about 2026: a market that rewards quality (but still loves memes)
Interestingly, the memecoin story isn’t simply “over.” Cointelegraph noted meme coins started 2026 with a bounce in market cap and volume, showing that speculative appetite can return quickly.
But the 2025 data suggests a more nuanced reality:
- Meme coins can rally hard in short bursts,
- yet the base rate of survival for the average token, especially low-effort launches, may be collapsing.
If 2024 was the “token creation industrial revolution,” 2025 looked like the mass extinction event that followed.
Bottom line
A CoinGecko Research snapshot of GeckoTerminal activity shows 2025 was the deadliest year on record for tokens, with 11.6M failures and a Q4 collapse of 7.7M, and meme coins sitting at the center of the fallout. The October 10 liquidation cascade, and the broader leverage/liquidity spiral it triggered, helped turn that fragility into a historic washout.
