The cryptocurrency market suffered an unprecedented wave of project collapses in 2025, with more than 11.6 million tokens failing in one year, according to new data from CoinGecko.
This figure represents 86.3% of all crypto failures recorded since 2021, making 2025 the most disruptive year for token viability in the history of the industry.
Token Creation Explosion—Viability Collapse, CoinGecko Report Shows
CoinGecko’s findings highlight the structural collapse of the token economy caused by the explosion of project creation, saturation of meme coins, and growing market disruption.
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In total, 53.2% of all cryptocurrencies tracked on Geckoterminal are currently inactive. Most of the outages occurred over the past two years.
From 2021 to 2025, the number of listed cryptocurrency projects jumped from 428,383 to nearly 20.2 million. This rapid growth reflects the increased accessibility of token creation tools, but has also led to severe market saturation.
A breakdown of the number of failures per year shows the scale of the change. Only 2,584 tokens failed in 2021. That number jumped to 213,075 in 2022 and 245,049 in 2023.
In 2024, the situation escalated rapidly and 1,382,010 tokens collapsed. However, 2025 was much smaller than previous years with 11,564,909 tokens failing.
2024 and 2025 together account for over 96% of all crypto token failures since 2021, reflecting how recent market conditions have fundamentally changed the viability of tokens.
CoinGecko’s methodology focused only on cryptocurrencies that had at least one transaction recorded and were listed on Geckoterminal before becoming inactive.
Tokens with zero trading activity were excluded and only tiered Pump.fun tokens were included, strengthening the reliability of the dataset.
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Q4 2025 hits breaking point amid saturation of meme coins and woes of “criminal organizations”
The collapse accelerated dramatically in the last months of the year. There were 7.7 million token failures in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone. This represents 34.9% of all disorders recorded over a 5-year period.
This spike coincided with the liquidation cascade on October 10, during which $19 billion in leveraged positions disappeared in less than 24 hours, making it the largest single-day deleveraging event in crypto history.
This shock has exposed vulnerabilities across poorly traded tokens, many of which are:
Lack of sufficient liquidity or committed market participants to weather extreme volatility.
CoinGecko noted that the precipitous decline in viability was particularly pronounced within the meme coin sector, which expanded rapidly throughout the year.
The rise of easy-to-use launchpads played a central role in the wave of failures. Platforms like Pump.fun have significantly reduced technical barriers, allowing almost anyone to launch tokens within minutes.
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This experimentation was democratized, but the market was flooded with low-effort projects that lacked long-term viability.
DWF Labs executive Andrei Grachev described the environment as crime season and pointed to the systemic pressures faced by both founders and investors.
His comments reflect the broader consolidation underway in the crypto market, where capital is increasingly drawn to Bitcoin, established assets, and short-term speculative trading. Because of this, new projects struggle to obtain sustainable liquidity.
The cluster of failures in 2025 has heightened concerns about the long-term health of token creation operations.
While innovation remains the cornerstone of the crypto market, data suggests that the market’s capacity to absorb new projects has become significantly overstretched.
As millions of tokens disappear, retailer confidence continues to erode, reducing available liquidity and raising the bar for future launches.
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Why the token failure cycle will be extended until 2026
Meanwhile, the forces that caused the crypto collapse in 2025 show little sign of reversing. Token creation is frictionless, retail liquidity is fragmented, and market attention remains focused on Bitcoin, blue-chip assets, and short-term speculative trading.
CoinGecko data shows that the supply of tokens is growing faster than the absorption capacity of the market. With nearly 20.2 million projects scheduled to be listed by the end of 2025, even a modest continuation of Launchpad-driven issuance risks increasing failure rates in 2026. This is especially true if demand and liquidity do not recover.
Market stress events also remain a key vulnerability. The October 10 liquidation cascade wiped out $19 billion in leveraged positions in less than 24 hours, demonstrating how quickly systemic shocks can cascade through lightly traded assets.
Tokens that lack deep liquidity and dedicated user bases have been disproportionately affected, suggesting that similar episodes of volatility could cause further large-scale failures.
Andrei Grachev, managing partner at DWF Labs, warned that the current environment is structurally hostile to new projects and described an ongoing “liquidity war” across the crypto market.
As retail capital dwindles and competition increases, new tokens face increasing barriers to survival. Without changes to launch incentives, disclosure standards, and investor education, the market risks repeating the same cycle of rapid issuance, short-term speculation, and eventual collapse.
Industry insiders have argued that the purge could ultimately strengthen cryptocurrencies by weeding out weaker projects, but data suggests the correction is far from complete.
If token generation continues to outpace liquidity growth, we may see fewer launches in 2026, but not necessarily fewer failures.
