Just checked some data on CoinGecko and the numbers are pretty wild — turns out more than half of all cryptocurrencies ever launched are basically dead now. We're talking about 53% of tokens that came out since 2021 being completely inactive. That's over 10 million tokens just gone.

But here's the crazy part: most of these failures happened last year. In 2025 alone, 11.6 million tokens failed, which is like 86% of everything that's died in the past five years. The whole Q4 was brutal — 7.7 million tokens collapsed in just three months. Right after that October liquidation cascade when $19 billion got wiped out in one day, the market just couldn't hold up.

A lot of this ties back to how easy it became to launch tokens. Platforms like pump.fun basically let anyone create a token with zero friction, so we got flooded with meme coins and low-effort projects that were never meant to last. Most of them never even had real trading volume before disappearing. Makes you wonder how many cryptocurrencies will fail in the next cycle, honestly. The barrier to entry being so low definitely has consequences.