Crypto Purge: 3.7 Million Tokens Vanish Since 2021—Market Cuts in Half After Pump.fun Mania
The great crypto reckoning is here—over 3.7 million digital tokens have evaporated since 2021, wiping out half the market’s value. What sparked the collapse? The post-Pump.fun hangover, where meme coins and vaporware projects finally met their reckoning.
Survival of the fittest: While Bitcoin and Ethereum shrug off the chaos, altcoins are dropping like flies. Traders are left holding bags of ’utility tokens’ that somehow forgot to include utility.
Finance never changes: Speculators chased the hype, founders cashed out, and now the market’s cleaning house. The irony? This might actually be healthy for crypto—just don’t tell the bagholders.
Number of cryptocurrencies that have failed since 2021. Source: CoinGecko.com
The research defined dead tokens as those no longer actively traded, noting that only tokens with at least one recorded trade before becoming inactive were counted. The data used in the study spans from July 2021 to March 2025.
Why So Many Tokens Died
The research suggested that the sharp rise in token failures over the past year may be linked to increased financial market volatility, particularly following the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, though it also noted this could be coincidental.
Another factor behind the high number of token failures may be the dramatic increase in the number of tokens listed between 2021 and 2025. GeckoTerminal recorded 428,383 projects in 2021, compared to 7 million in 2025, a striking difference. The launch of Pump.fun has been linked to this rise, as it significantly lowered the barrier to creating meme coins and low-effort projects.
Before Pump.fun debuted in 2024, the number of failed projects was significantly lower. Between 2021 and 2023, failures remained within the lower end of the six-figure range, accounting for just 12.6% of the total token loss.
Not all is doom and gloom, however. While many meme coins have failed, some continue to perform well. For example, FartCoin saw a 30% increase earlier this month, pushing its market capitalization above $1 billion for the first time and making it the 62nd largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
Despite the number of meme coins that disappear, high-quality projects will always rise to the top.
nextCrypto Collapse: 3.7 Million Cryptocurrencies Gone Since 2021, Halving the Market Post-Pump.fun Era
