CoinGecko has reported that about 52.7% of all cryptocurrencies listed on the GeckoTerminal have become “dead coins” and a majority of those deaths occurred between 2024 and early 2025.
There are various reasons for the sharp decline in token survivability, including broader market turbulence, bad fundamentals and platforms that made it exponentially easier to deploy tokens without coding knowledge.
What followed was a surge in token deployment as normal people just looking to make a quick buck took advantage.
The scale of the failure and the reasons behind it
The report claims that the first quarter of this year alone saw the collapse of 1.8 million tokens, which is more than half the tally of project failures on record.
While the number of tokens considered dead have increased astronomically, the total number of cryptocurrency projects has also skyrocketed. As of 2021, there were 428,383 projects listed on GeckoTerminal. Now in 2025, that number has skyrocketed to nearly 7 million.
As of March 31, 1.8 million cryptocurrency projects have been pronounced dead in 2025, the highest number of failures recorded in a single year. The failures account for 49.7% of all project closures between 2021 and 2025.
Other than 2025, which still has several months to go, 2024 was the year that recorded the most failures, with nearly 1.4 million projects failing, which accounted for 37.7% of the overall failure count in the past five years.
The year also saw the highest number of launches, with over 3 million new projects entering the market.
As earlier stated, this huge surge in token deployment can mostly be linked to the launch of Pump.fun, a platform that makes it easy to create tokens. The platform triggered an onslaught of meme coins and low-effort projects entering the market.
Before the launch of Pump.fun in 2024, there were considerably fewer cryptocurrency failures. Project failures between 2021 and 2023 made up a mere 12.6% of all cryptocurrency failures over the past five years.
Another potential reason for the surge in failures is the broader market volatility since Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, a development that coincided with a downturn in the crypto market despite his embrace of crypto.
How to identify dead coins and avoid projects with short life expectancy
Dead coins have been around since 2017, when an initial coin offering (ICO) craze gripped the industry. Before the ICOs, the number of available coins was just 29, but after that period, there were over 850 projects, 80% of which turned out to be scams.
Platforms that track these dead coins only consider a cryptocurrency dead or abandoned if it has had a trading volume of less than $1,000 within three months.
CoinGecko only recognized tokens collectively termed as “cryptocurrencies” that were once listed on GeckoTerminal but are no longer actively traded as dead coins.
Interestingly, the recently released report only included Pump.fun tokens that were able to “graduate”, disregarding the millions of other tokens that never reached that threshold. Those too would be in the category of dead coins.
A few characteristics that can help anyone identify dead or potentially dead coins include negligible trading volume, no use case, little or no funding and lack of a concrete plan.
To avoid them, investors first need to accept the fact that these tokens exist, then carry out extensive background checks, check profit statements, the coin’s availability on exchanges and its trading volumes to determine if a currency is valuable or likely to fail.
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