Crypto has seen over 3.7 million tokens disappear since 2021, with nearly half of those shutting down during the Pump.fun memecoin wave, according to a report by GeckoTerminal. In total, more than half of all the cryptocurrencies ever created are no longer active and are now considered failures.
According to the research pricing platform, crypto has seen millions of tokens disappear since 2021, with almost half of those losses happening in 2024 and early 2025. CoinGecko, being a crypto listing platform, highlighted that about 52.7% of all listed projects have failed, most especially during this recent time.
The platform also recorded that the number of crypto projects has grown fast. In 2021, GeckoTerminal had about 428,000 crypto/altcoins listed. By 2025, that figure rose to almost 7 million. The rise in its number is mostly because of pump.fun, a tool that made creating and marketing tokens easy, causing a wave of meme coins and basic projects to enter the space.
Q1 Crypto 2025 Crash Fuels Record Token Losses
By March 31st, 2025, the platform recorded that 1.8 million crypto projects had shut down, marking the highest yearly total ever seen. These closures made up 49.7% of all token failures from 2021 to 2025. In 2024, nearly 1.4 million projects disappeared, making up 37.7% of failures over the five-year span.
The report also highlighted that 2024 had the most launches, with over 3 million new tokens launched. It also showed signs of trouble. Before pump.fun launched in 2024, the yearly amount of crypto failures was much lower, staying within the six-digit range. Between 2021 and 2023, shutdowns only made up 12.6% of the total.
However, it could be said that the huge wave of closures in Q1 of this year may be linked to overall market weakness, especially after Donald Trump’s return to office in January.
