Failed Cryptos Flood the Market as Speculation and Fear Take Over

The crypto graveyard is growing fast. According to CoinGecko, more than half of all digital tokens launched since 2021 have already vanished—roughly 3.7 million failed projects, or 52.7% of listings on GeckoTerminal.

And 2025 isn’t slowing down: the first quarter alone has seen over 1.8 million new casualties, nearly topping all of 2024.

The flood of worthless tokens is being fueled by a mix of economic anxiety, impulsive retail speculation, and the meme coin gold rush.

New platforms like pump.fun have made token creation nearly effortless, resulting in an avalanche of one-and-done projects with no roadmap or real intent to last. Binance estimates that nearly all meme coins—about 97%—end up dead shortly after launch.

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Geopolitical instability and fears surrounding Trump’s return to office have also spooked the market. With inflation back in the spotlight, investors are shedding high-risk assets in favor of safer havens like gold—leaving even Bitcoin’s role as digital gold up for debate.

Despite the surge in failures, the sheer number of new projects keeps rising. The space has ballooned from 428,000 listings in 2021 to nearly 7 million in 2025. But as nearly half of all coin deaths this decade have occurred just this year, the question now is: how much of this is innovation—and how much is noise?

Alexander Stefanov