Crypto market volatility took a heavy toll on memecoins last year, helping push the number of failed crypto projects to more than 11.6 million in 2025 — the highest total ever recorded in a single year.
The final quarter of 2025 was particularly brutal. About 7.7 million tokens listed on GeckoTerminal stopped trading during the period, according to a report released Friday by CoinGecko research analyst Shaun Paul Lee.
Lee pointed to the Oct. 10 market crash as a major trigger, when more than $19 billion in leveraged crypto positions were liquidated in a single day.
“This steep drop in token survivability likely reflects the broader market turmoil seen throughout the year, which hit the memecoin sector especially hard,” he said.
The scale of failures marked a dramatic increase from prior years. Around 1.3 million projects listed on GeckoTerminal collapsed in 2024, compared with just 2,584 failures in 2021.
Memecoins rank among the most speculative assets in crypto, with their rise or collapse often reflecting how much risk investors are prepared to take.
Another factor behind the surge in token failures appears to be the sheer number of new coins created in 2025. Data from GeckoTerminal shows that the total number of listed tokens jumped from about 3 million at the end of 2024 to roughly 20 million by the end of 2025.
Lee highlighted the launch of the Solana-based memecoin platform pump.fun in January 2024 as a key contributor to this explosion in supply.
“The simplicity of issuing tokens through launchpads has driven an influx of low-effort memecoins and projects into the market,” he said.
“Before the launch of pump.fun in 2024, cryptocurrency failures numbered in the low six digits. Project failures between 2021 and 2023 made up just 3.4% of all cryptocurrency failures over the past five years.”
Memecoin market cap surges into 2026
Memecoins kicked off the new year with a sharp rally, as total market capitalization climbed from $38 billion on Dec. 29 to $47.7 billion by Jan. 5, before easing back to about $43.7 billion as of Monday, CoinMarketCap data shows.
Over the same period, memecoin transaction volumes soared by roughly 300%, jumping from $2.17 billion to $8.7 billion. While volumes have since cooled to around $3.69 billion on Monday, they were still up more than 34% on the day.
