The expensive calculation of the cryptocurrency market
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At the end of 2025, 11.6 million cryptocurrency projects, or “dead” tokens, were listed as non-existent. This is an unprecedented number, accounting for more than 86% of all projects that have ceased operations in the last five years (2021-2025). According to CoinGecko, 53.2% of all cryptocurrencies registered on the GeckoTerminal platform have failed, most of them in 2025. The study analyzes the total number of coins and tokens that were previously available on GeckoTerminal but are no longer actively traded, grouped by the last year of active trading.
2024 – a rapid influx of new projects and a significant decline
Nearly 1.4 million cryptocurrency projects ended in 2024, representing 10.3% of the total decline over the past five years. Interestingly, the second highest number of new projects was also registered in the same year – more than 3 million new projects entered the market. Before the launchpad platform pump.fun, popularized in 2024, project failures were measured in the lower six figures. Thus, project failures between 2021 and 2023 accounted for only a small part – 3.4% of the total five-year decline. Only tokens that had at least one transaction prior to the shutdown are included in the study.
The third quarter – an alarming decline and its reasons
The data for the fourth quarter of 2025, when 7.7 million tokens “died”, which is 34.9% of all registered project failures, are particularly worrying. This drastic drop in survival is mainly due to the systemic turbulence after the “cascade of liquidations” on 10 October. During this record-breaking event, $19 billion in margin positions were liquidated in one day, the largest one-day deleveraging in cryptocurrency history.
Boom of meme coins and wave of low quality projects
Despite the upheavals of the cryptocurrency market in 2025, the total number of projects has grown rapidly. If in 2021 428,383 projects were registered in GeckoTerminal, then in 2025 their number will increase to almost 20.2 million. The ease of creating tokens using launchpad platforms has led to an influx of low-quality meme coins and minimal effort projects. According to Cointelegraph data, the meme coin segment suffered the biggest losses in 2025, becoming the main driving force behind the record-breaking increase in the number of “dead” tokens. Analysts point out that a significant number of projects ceased active trading almost immediately after launch, unable to maintain liquidity or market interest. The rapid increase in the number of “dead” tokens took place against the background of the “explosive” growth of exchange lists: if at the end of 2024 about 3 million tokens were tracked on GeckoTerminal, then at the end of 2025 their number reached almost 20 million.
