Memecoin Meltdown: 11.6 Million Token Failures in a Single Year
The speculative frenzy has crashed—hard. Over 11.6 million digital tokens have flatlined in the past year, a staggering failure rate that exposes the raw, unregulated underbelly of the memecoin craze.
The Great Washout
It's a brutal Darwinian purge. Projects launched on hype and hollow promises are vanishing faster than they appeared. The data doesn't lie: millions of tokens have gone to zero, leaving trails of vaporized capital in their wake. This isn't a minor correction; it's a full-scale ecosystem reset.
Survival of the Fittest
For every dog-themed coin that mooned, countless others were pure pump-and-dump schemes. The infrastructure—cheap to deploy, easier to abandon—enabled this explosion of junk. Now, the market's doing what regulators never could: it's cutting out the noise with ruthless efficiency. The survivors? Tokens with actual communities, utility, or at least a meme durable enough to last more than one news cycle.
A Cynical Cleansing
Let's call it what it is: a spectacular market enema. While painful for bag-holders, this collapse is arguably healthy. It forces a conversation about value beyond viral tweets and filters capital toward more substantive innovation. After all, what's a few billion in losses between degenerates? Consider it the most expensive financial literacy course ever devised—and the tuition was paid entirely in hope and hubris.
11.6M token failures dominated by meme coin collapses
CoinGecko data revealed 11.6 million cryptocurrency projects failed in 2025, the highest number of failures recorded in a single year. These failures account for 86.3% of all project closures between 2021 and 2025. The analysis looked into tokens once listed on GeckoTerminal that are no longer actively traded.
The report stated the drop in token survivability may be linked to overall market volatility throughout the year. Meme coins were affected the most as low-effort tokens launched on platforms like pump.fun dominated new listings.
Only tokens that had one trade or more before going defunct were considered in the study. For pump.fun tokens, only those which graduated from the platform were included. The methodology covers data taken between July 1, 2021 and December 31, 2025.
As of December 31, 2025, over half of all cryptocurrencies on GeckoTerminal have failed. The 53.2% failure rate spans the entire period since 2021.
The fourth quarter of 2025 alone witnessed the collapse of 7.7 million tokens, making up 34.9% of all recorded project failures since 2021. During the October 10 liquidation, $19 billion in Leveraged positions was wiped out in 24 hours.
The October 10 event was the largest single-day deleveraging in crypto history. Meme coins suffered disproportionately during the Q4 collapse.
Total cryptocurrency projects surged to 20.2M in 2025
Despite turbulent market conditions, the total number of cryptocurrency projects surged in 2025. In 2021, 428,383 projects were listed on GeckoTerminal. By 2025, that number had spiked to nearly 20.2 million projects.
Pump.fun surfaced as the dominant meme coin launchpad in 2024 and 2025 and allowed anyone to create tokens within minutes. The automated process required no technical knowledge or development resources.
While 20.2 million projects existed by year-end 2025, over 11.6 million failed during the year. The ratio suggests the majority of 2025 launches collapsed within the same year.
2024 recorded 1.38M failures before meme coin pump
The year 2024 saw nearly 1.4 million projects fail, accounting for 10.3% of all failures in the past five years. The period also saw the second-highest number of launches with over 3.0 million new projects coming to market.
Project failures between 2021 and 2023 made up just 3.4% of all cryptocurrency failures over the past five years. The year 2023 recorded 245,049 failures. The year 2022 saw 213,075 token collapses. The year 2021 witnessed just 2,584 failures.
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