Half of cryptocurrency projects have already failed, with +11 million inactive tokens at the moment
More than half of all cryptocurrencies ever created are no longer traded, according to an analysis by CoinGecko, highlighting a sharp acceleration in project failures that peaked in 2025 as token creation surged and market liquidity deteriorated.
- Of more than 20 million tokens launched between mid-2021 and the end of 2025, 53% are no longer traded.
- In 2025 alone, roughly 11.6 million tokens became inactive, accounting for 86.3% of all recorded failures over the five-year period.
- Between October and December 2025, an estimated 7.7 million tokens failed, marking the highest failure rate yet.
- A $19 billion liquidation event on October 10, known as the “liquidation cascade,” coincided with the sharpest quarterly decline since 2021.
CoinGecko’s analysis shows that the collapse of cryptocurrency projects did not unfold gradually but accelerated sharply in 2025. While earlier years saw comparatively limited attrition, the scale of failures expanded rapidly as automation lowered the barriers to launching new tokens.
Platforms designed to simplify token creation played a central role in this expansion. Launchpads such as “pump.fun” enabled users to deploy digital assets within minutes, often without a product, purpose, or development roadmap. CoinGecko analyst Shaun Paul Lee said these tools reduced entry barriers but flooded markets with low-effort memecoins, many of which ceased trading shortly after launch.
The consequences of this dynamic became most visible in the final quarter of 2025. CoinGecko estimates that 7.7 million tokens failed between October and December 2025, overlapping with a major liquidity shock on October 10. During that event, $19 billion in leveraged cryptocurrency positions were forcibly unwound, draining liquidity from decentralized exchanges and pushing already fragile tokens into permanent inactivity. Lee described the episode as the largest deleveraging event in crypto’s history, one that exposed the fragility of the post-bull-cycle market environment.
Longer-term data underscores the pace of deterioration. Just 2,584 projects went inactive in 2021. By 2024, that figure had risen to more than 1.3 million before surging dramatically in 2025. CoinGecko’s dataset tracks projects that recorded at least one trade before going silent, illustrating how many tokens effectively fail soon after launch.
According to CoinGecko, the underlying issue is structural. Blockchain’s permissionless design enables innovation but also allows near-unlimited replication, making token creation increasingly frictionless. As a result, network capacity, liquidity, and user attention have struggled to keep pace with the volume of new digital assets entering the market.
