Last year saw the largest crypto project wipeout in the industry’s history, showing just how saturated the market was with short-lived assets.
Namely, more than half of all cryptocurrencies launched in the past five years are now inactive, with 2025 alone responsible for more than 85% of all project failures, according to a CoinGecko report published on January 12.
Specifically, of the 20.2 million token listings on GeckoTerminal introduced between mid-2021 and the end of 2026, 11.6 million, or 53.2%, died in 2025 alone.
That means 2025 saw over eight times more failures than 2024, which lines up with the explosion of ultra-low-effort meme coins, pump-and-dump launches, and automated token factories that flooded chains like Solana (SOL), Base, and BNB during the 2025 cycle.
Analyst Shaun Paul Lee said the wipeout was driven largely by launchpads such as pump.fun, which dramatically lowered the barrier to token creation. In other words, the platforms enabled a flood of speculative projects, many of which recorded only a handful of trades before being consigned to oblivion.
Q4 2025 was the worst for new crypto projects
The fourth quarter of 2025 was the worst, seeing 7.7 million tokens fail in just three months, which is roughly 35% of all crypto deaths since 2021.
Among the most notable catalysts was the implosion following the October 10 liquidation cascade, when $19 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out in a single day, triggering what Lee called the largest deleveraging event the industry has ever seen.
In contrast, the same report highlights only 2,584 project failures in 2021, while the number rose to 1.3 million in 2024. As such, the figures have left traders concerned about market quality, as they suggest the landscape has been crowded by pump-and-dump schemes and projects offering little to no real utility.
Changing investor sentiment is also visible in low retail engagement. For instance, crypto YouTube viewership has likewise fallen to its lowest level since early 2021, one reason likely being that many traders appear exhausted with bots and predatory practices that drown more engaging and genuine content.
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