Is Crypto Dead? The Majority of Tokens Launched Since 2021 Are Now Gone

The short answer: it’s looking increasingly like it for most of the market. Over half of all cryptocurrency tokens that entered the market since mid-2021 have simply stopped trading, according to a major analysis by CoinGecko. Out of nearly 20.2 million tokens tracked on GeckoTerminal during this period, 53.2% are now completely inactive. But the story gets darker when you zoom in on recent developments.

The real shock happened in 2025. A staggering 11.6 million tokens failed last year alone—meaning 86.3% of all project deaths since 2021 occurred in just twelve months. To put that in perspective, only 2,584 projects died back in 2021. By 2024, that number had climbed to over 1.3 million. Then 2025 happened, and the floodgates opened entirely.

How Memecoin Platforms Turned Token Creation Into a Lottery

One major culprit? The explosion of low-effort memecoin platforms like pump.fun, according to CoinGecko analyst Shaun Paul Lee. These launchpads essentially turned token creation into a point-and-click operation. Anyone could launch a token with minimal development work or financial commitment. The barrier to entry dropped to near zero, triggering a wave of speculative assets that had no actual backing, no real development team, and often just a handful of trades before vanishing forever.

These weren’t projects designed to solve problems or build communities. They were quick speculation plays, and most collapsed before finding any real traction.

October 2025: The $19 Billion Liquidation That Broke the Market

Then came October 10, 2025—the day the crypto market faced its worst deleveraging event in history. A $19 billion liquidation cascade wiped out leveraged positions in a single day, and the shockwaves didn’t stop there. Lee described it as the largest unwinding of short-term bets the industry had ever seen. The market was already overexposed to speculation, and this event triggered a domino effect.

The consequences were staggering. In just three months of Q4 2025, 7.7 million tokens failed—that’s roughly 35% of all token deaths since 2021 compressed into a single quarter. The open-access design of crypto markets, which had once seemed like a feature, suddenly looked like a fatal flaw. Too many tokens, too little value, and not enough reason for most to survive.

What the Numbers Actually Tell Us

Here’s the uncomfortable truth embedded in these statistics: the crypto market has become saturated with projects that were never meant to last. Memecoin platforms democratized token creation, but democratization without scrutiny leads to a graveyard of failed experiments.

The data shows a clear timeline of escalation:

• 2021: 2,584 token failures
• 2024: Over 1.3 million token failures
• 2025: 11.6 million token failures (86.3% of all deaths on record)

Is Crypto Actually Dead?

So is crypto dead? Not quite—but the casual token ecosystem certainly is. Thousands of projects that launched with no real purpose have predictably gone nowhere. What remains viable is the infrastructure, the major projects with sustained development, and the market mechanisms themselves. The real story isn’t that crypto is dead; it’s that most tokens were never alive in the first place. They were speculation vehicles masquerading as projects, and 2025 was the year the market finally corrected for that reality.

The simplest way to understand what happened: when launching a token becomes easier than starting a social media account, you get millions of dead tokens. That’s not a feature of the technology—it’s a warning sign about market discipline and investor due diligence.