The year 2025 made crypto history — and not in a good way. According to data from CoinGecko, a staggering 11.6 million crypto tokens failed, with the majority being short-lived meme coins. In fact, more than half of all coins launched since 2021 are now defunct.
The Largest Collapse in Crypto History
This mass wipeout means that 2025 alone accounted for 86.3% of all recorded token failures since 2021. The main culprit? A flood of tokens generated via platforms like pump.fun, which allowed anyone to mint new coins in minutes — with no oversight or technical background required.
The peak of the crash came in October 2025, when on a single day — October 10 — the market saw the largest liquidation event in crypto history. In just 24 hours, $19 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out, and 7.7 million tokens disappeared. Meme coins were the first to fall.
Half of GeckoTerminal Projects Have Failed
Between mid-2021 and the end of 2025, over 53% of all projects listed on GeckoTerminal ended in failure. Yet 2025 also saw explosive growth: 20.2 million tokens were launched, compared to just 428,383 in 2021 — a nearly 50-fold increase.
However, most tokens launched in 2025 failed within the same year, confirming the speculative nature of many of these ventures.
Token Failures Aren’t New – But the Numbers Are Shocking
In 2024, nearly 1.4 million projects failed, during a year when over 3 million new ones were created. In contrast, between 2021 and 2023, the crypto space was more stable — those three years combined accounted for just 3.4% of all token failures.
The data confirms that the meme coin boom triggered unprecedented volatility and collapse across the ecosystem.
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