Before meme coin launch pads boomed, crypto project failures remained relatively low.
More than half of all cryptocurrencies tracked on CoinGecko’s GeckoTerminal have now failed. Such a significant volume of symbolic survival collapse is largely caused by excessive speculation and market instability.
According to the crypto aggregator’s latest report, 53.2% of all cryptocurrencies listed on GeckoTerminal are classified as dead, with the majority of failures occurring in 2025.
Failed crypto projects
About 11.6 million tokens collapsed, accounting for 86.3% of all cryptocurrency failures recorded between 2021 and 2025. The magnitude of the losses is a sharp break from previous years and signals the growing fragility of a market that is becoming increasingly saturated with short-lived projects, especially within the meme coin segment.
Coin gecko declared that the fourth quarter of 2025 was especially destructive. During the period of these three months alone, there were 7.7 million token failures, which represented 34.9% of all recorded project collapses. Interestingly, this rise in failures coincided with increased systemic stress following the October 10 liquidation cascade, when approximately $19 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out within 24 hours, making it the largest single-day deleveraging in crypto market history.
As market volatility increased in 2025, the number of cryptocurrency projects continued to grow rapidly. The total number of projects on GeckoTerminal grew from just 428,383 in 2021 to nearly 20.2 million in 2025. The report attributed this explosive growth to the increasing ease of token creation via launch pads, which has lowered barriers to entry and encouraged a wave of low-cost meme coins and experimental projects.
The number of bankruptcies increased after 2023
The annual outage data showed how sharply conditions deteriorated. In 2021, only 2,584 projects failed. This number increased to 213,075 in 2022 and 245,049 in 2023. The number of bankruptcies increased significantly in 2024, reaching approximately 1.38 million, before rising to over 11.56 million in 2025.
Despite seeing more than 3 million new launches and the second highest number of project closures in 2024, it still accounted for only 10.3% of total failures over the past five years. CoinGecko found that prior to 2024, and before platforms like Solana-based meme coin launcher Pump.fun gained traction, annual crypto project failures remained in the low six figures, while the combined failures from 2021 to 2023 represented just 3.4% of all closures since 2021.
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