2025’s Wave of Dead Tokens Shocks Crypto

When the market woke up to CoinGecko’s latest industry snapshot, even veterans took a breath. The research platform counted 1.8 million tokens that flat-lined in the first three months of 2025—an eye-watering figure equal to 49.7% of every project failure recorded since 2021. In other words, half the graveyard appeared in just one quarter.

CoinGecko’s study stops short of pinning a single culprit, but its data sketches an unmistakable arc. Token creation exploded over the past year, driven largely by Solana’s wildfire meme-coin culture. The blockchain’s low fees and instant settlement birthed an army of community coins; today Solana accounts for more than 60% of the 14.6 million live tokens tracked by CoinMarketCap. Yet many of those coins now lie dormant, their Discord servers silent and liquidity pools drained.

The report frames 2025 as an inflection point. Where 2023’s mania centred on AI tokens and 2024 crowned real-world-asset plays, this cycle has been all meme, all the time. Launchpads such as Pump.fun and Raydium’s new LaunchLab lowered the barrier to entry to near zero: a catchy ticker, a smart-contract template, and a few SOL were enough to mint the next would-be Pepe. The result was a deluge no market could absorb. New supply outpaced demand, liquidity thinned, and volatility spiked.

CoinGecko’s analysts note that Trump’s return to the White House—and the tariff sabre-rattling that followed—added macro pressure just as retail money piled into untested coins. Futures funding flipped negative, leveraged longs unwound, and rug-pull operators took advantage of jittery sentiment. By late March, thousands of projects showed on-chain activity that could be measured in mere cents, not dollars.

Behind the headlines lurks a broader story: 52.7% of all tokens launched since 2021 have failed. That figure challenges the narrative that crypto’s long tail eventually finds “product-market fit.” Instead, many assets never move beyond speculative fervour. The report’s base case still sees net growth—launches outnumbering extinctions—but the authors warn the trajectory is unsustainable without a quality filter.

Developers point to deeper root causes. Liquidity fragmentation forces traders to hop across dozens of DEXs; opaque tokenomics encourage fast exits over long-term building; and smart-contract clones recycle code with zero innovation. Add in regulatory grey zones and coordinated social-media hype, and you have a recipe for mass attrition.

CoinGecko declines to declare the meme-coin era over. Nevertheless, it urges builders to adopt rigorous audit standards, transparent vesting, and genuine utility if they hope to survive the cull. Whether Trump’s economic policies are truly to blame or merely coincidental headwinds, the raw numbers speak: 2025 has become crypto’s Darwinian moment.

An industry that prides itself on permissionless creativity is learning that infinite supply meets finite attention. If the first quarter is any indicator, only tokens with compelling use-cases, sound economics, and deep community roots will dodge the next statistical purge.