Dead On Arrival: 25% Of New Crypto Tokens Didn’t Survive Q1 ’25

A wave of failures on a previously unimaginable scale has swept over the crypto market at the start of 2025, with a record 1.8 million tokens collapsing during the first quarter. That is almost 25% of all crypto tokens issued since 2021, says a report by crypto information platform CoinGecko.

The meltdown hits a massive portion of the crypto market. According to CoinGecko research analyst Shaun Paul Lee, of the almost 7 million cryptocurrencies listed since 2021, over half (3.6 million) have ceased trading entirely. The mortality rate has surged significantly from earlier years.

The first three months of 2025 experienced more token failures than any calendar year on record, Lee wrote in his April 30 report. The figure is especially noteworthy compared to the whole span from 2021 through 2023, which represented only 12.6% of all cryptocurrency failures in the last five years.

As the report states, the recent die-off of tokens coincides with wider market volatility since Donald Trump’s inauguration as US President in January. As Bitcoin hit an all-time high during this period, it was followed by a steep decline in crypto markets.

Things got worse in March, when both cryptocurrency and equity markets saw unprecedented volatility. This volatility followed Trump’s threat to apply sweeping tariffs, which caused shockwaves in multiple financial markets.

The record surge in token failures begins back in January of 2024, when an easy token creation tool called Pump.fun emerged. The website allowed for it to be extremely easy to build new cryptocurrencies, causing a torrent of memecoins and lazy projects to flood the market.

More than 3 million new crypto tokens were released in 2024 alone – almost four times the amount of 2023, which had slightly more than 835,000 new additions. Prior to Pump.fun, cryptocurrency failures were not very common, with figures in the “low six digits,” Lee’s analysis said.

The statistics are such that approximately 98% of tokens minted on Pump.fun do not live past the site. Even at the platform’s most successful week in November of 2024, only 1.67% of memecoins managed to transition to the open market.

CoinGecko founder Bobby Ong noted in a March report that investor demand for memecoins seems to have dissipated following a string of failed launches. He specifically cited the aftermath of the Libra (LIBRA) token launch as part of the reason.

Although Pump.fun saw its all-time weekly trading volume after Trump’s memecoin launched on January 18, the volatility that followed in the markets seems to have subdued the excitement in the crypto sector.

The report indicates how the marriage of simple token creation software and volatile market conditions has formed a perfect storm for cryptocurrency collapse, with no indication that the trend will be slowing down as we progress further into 2025.

Featured image from Gemini Imagen, chart from TradingView