53% of cryptos launched since 2021 have failed, 2024 and 2025 claimed the most victims

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..