Crypto death toll hits 3.7m since 2021, with 50% of coins wiped out post-Pump.fun era, research shows

More than 3.7 million cryptocurrency tokens have failed since 2021, with nearly half of those collapses occurring during the Pump.fun-driven memecoin craze.

Millions of tokens have failed since 2021, with nearly half of those collapses recorded in 2024 and early 2025, according to new research by crypto pricing platform GeckoTerminal.

The number of dead tokens | Source: CoinGeckoAccording to the research, a total of 1.8 million tokens failed in Q1 this year alone, making up 49.7% of all token failures recorded between 2021 and 2025. In 2024, nearly 1.4 million projects also went under, accounting for 37.7% of failures. Together, the two years saw most of the crypto market’s token shutdowns.

“This sharp decline in token survivability may be linked to broader market turbulence, particularly following Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, which coincided with a downturn in the crypto market.”

GeckoTerminal

The number of new crypto projects has also surged. For instance, just over 428,000 tokens were listed on crypto price aggregator platforms in 2021. By 2025, that number had jumped to nearly seven million. The researchers say much of this growth “can be attributed to the launch of Pump.fun, which simplified the process of creating tokens, leading to a flood of meme coins and low-effort projects entering the market.”

Before Pump.fun launched in 2024, the number of project failures was significantly lower. From 2021 to 2023, failures remained in the low six digits. Combined, those three years accounted for just 12.6% of total token deaths, the data shows.

GeckoTerminal explained that it defines “dead tokens” as those which are no longer actively traded, noting that only tokens that had “one trade or more” before going defunct were considered.