Crypto Graveyard Swells: Nearly 2 Million Tokens Flatline in Q1 2025

The great crypto reckoning isn’t coming—it’s here. First-quarter data reveals a bloodbath: 1.98 million digital assets joined the blockchain cemetery as speculative mania meets Darwinian economics.

Death by a thousand shitcoins

Projects collapsed faster than a leveraged trader during a flash crash. The usual suspects dominated autopsy reports: rug pulls, vaporware ’utility’ tokens, and DeFi protocols offering 10,000% APY (until they didn’t).

Silver lining for degenerates

Survivors show eerie correlation with projects having actual revenue—a concept apparently as revolutionary as blockchain itself. Meanwhile, VC-funded ’Ethereum killers’ now rank below Dogecoin in developer activity.

This is your periodic reminder that 99% of tokens exist solely to separate retail investors from their money—but hey, those casino earnings reports won’t write themselves.

When the timeline is expanded to include data from 2021 to 2025, more than 3.6 million tokens have failed.

CoinGecko attributes much of this collapse to the explosive growth of memecoins and the increasing use of simplified token creation platforms like the Solana-based Pump.fun platform, which gained traction in 2024.

According to CoinGecko, Pump.fun was pivotal in making 2024 the second-worst year for crypto project failures. The firm noted that nearly 1.4 million tokens shut down last year, translating to about 37.7% of total shutdowns during the past five years.

At the same time, 2024 also saw a massive spike in token creation, with more than 3 million new tokens entering the market.

However, this surge in volume did not bring sustainable growth. Many of these tokens lacked clear use cases, strong communities, or long-term viability. Instead, they were launched quickly, often as speculative assets, with little thought to their development or longevity.

Meanwhile, before platforms like Pump.fun gained momentum, token failure rates remained relatively low. Between 2021 and 2023, shutdowns accounted for only 12.6% of all token deaths logged over the five years.