Crypto Glut Turns to Graveyard as 1.8M Tokens Died in Q1 2025
The crypto market has just witnessed one of its most brutal quarters on record, with a staggering 1.8 million tokens dying in the first three months of 2025 alone.
According to a damning new study by CoinGecko, these Q1 failures account for nearly half of all token deaths in the last five years.
Rise and Fall of Instant Tokens
The numbers captured in the report are sobering: nearly one in four tokens launched since 2021 are now considered dead. At the heart of this token extinction event is a storm triggered by a market correction following Bitcoins brief post-inauguration rally in January 2025 and the unchecked rise of token generators like Pump.fun.
While the platform, launched in early 2024, has democratized token creation, critics argue that it has also contributed to diluting the industrys integrity. It allows users to launch coins in mere minutes without needing any coding knowledge, fueling a meme coin gold rush that overwhelmed crypto platforms and flooded markets with short-lived speculative assets.
Since mid-2021, GeckoTerminal has listed nearly 7 million tokens, but according to the report, 52.7%, amounting to more than 3.7 million cryptocurrencies, have now stopped trading and have officially been categorized as failed. While the sharp uptick in failures started in 2024, Q1 2025 has been particularly brutal, with at least 1.8 million tokens going dark by March 31.
A Market in Crisis
Historically, the rate at which crypto projects collapsed was relatively modest. Per the CoinGecko survey, out of more than 428,000 tokens listed in 2021, only 2,584 failed.
The number of listed crypto assets increased to 724,706 in 2022, with failures also growing significantly to 213,075. These figures remained fairly consistent in 2023, with 835,183 created and about 245,000 dying.
However, in 2024, the number of launched tokens skyrocketed, going past the 3 million mark thanks in part to Pump.fun. Such was the amount of activity on the platform that at one point it became the main driver behind Solanas recent dominance of the decentralized exchange (DEX) market. Still, the high number of coins churned resulted in just as many deaths, hitting north of 1.3 million by the end of that year.
2025 seems to have picked up where 2024 left off. Only slightly more than 117,000 tokens out of the 1.93 million that were created in the first three months of the year have survived, meaning just under 94% fizzled out unceremoniously.
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