CoinGecko’s 2025 Snapshot: The Memecoin Shakeout That “Killed” 11.6 Million Tokens

CoinGecko’s 2025 statistics paint a harsh picture of the crypto market’s latest boom-and-bust cycle: it wasn’t just prices that crashed—projects disappeared by the millions. In its recent research, CoinGecko reports that a huge share of tokens listed across major on-chain tracking venues ended up inactive, with many effectively “dead” due to vanishing liquidity, halted trading, or abandoned communities.
The most striking number is the scale of failures recorded in 2025 alone. CoinGecko counts 11,564,909 tokens as failed in that single year, dwarfing the total number of failures seen across the prior years in the same research window. Put simply, token mortality wasn’t evenly distributed across the cycle—2025 was the year the market’s excess finally hit a wall.
A big driver was the sheer ease of token creation. Launchpads, automated token tooling, and copy-paste contract templates lowered the barrier to entry so much that the market became flooded with ultra-short-lived assets—especially memecoins. When millions of tokens compete for attention at the same time, most won’t develop sustained liquidity, credible distribution, or any reason to exist beyond the first burst of hype. In that environment, “failure” often looks less like a dramatic collapse and more like a quiet fade-out: trading volume dries up, holders move on, and the token becomes untradeable.
CoinGecko’s breakdown suggests the situation worsened dramatically in late 2025. A large portion of the year’s failures clustered in Q4, a period marked by intense volatility and deleveraging across the broader crypto market. When leverage unwinds quickly, liquidity becomes scarce and risk appetite collapses—conditions that are especially lethal for thinly traded, hype-driven tokens.
The memecoin segment reflects these dynamics clearly. CoinGecko’s 2025 memecoin analysis describes how sentiment cooled significantly over the year, and how controversies and narrative shifts contributed to a sharp contraction in the sector’s overall market value by late 2025. When the crowd rotates to the next story, yesterday’s meme can become today’s dead coin.
For investors and builders, the lesson is straightforward: abundance is not strength. In a market where token creation is effortless, survivability becomes the real signal. Liquidity depth, transparent incentives, distribution quality, and long-term engagement matter far more than viral momentum. CoinGecko’s 2025 data is a reminder that most tokens are not built to last—and in the next cycle, the same forces will likely return.