In 2025, over 11.6 million crypto projects will exit, with Meme coins becoming the "hardest hit" area

In 2025, the crypto market experienced a period of high volatility, with a large number of projects lacking fundamental support being quickly eliminated. Data shows that approximately 11.6 million crypto projects declared failure throughout the year, setting a new record. Among them, Meme coin-related tokens were hit the hardest, becoming the core targets of market cleansing.

In terms of time distribution, project failures mainly concentrated in the fourth quarter of last year. CoinGecko analyst Shaun Paul Lee pointed out in the report that between October and December 2025, about 7.7 million tokens on GeckoTerminal ceased trading. The market plunge on October 10 was seen as a critical turning point, with over $19 billion in leveraged positions liquidated on that day, accelerating the clearing of many high-risk projects.

According to CoinGecko’s definition, “failed projects” refer to tokens that once had active trading on GeckoTerminal but subsequently stopped trading completely. Compared to previous cycles, the scale of liquidation in 2025 has significantly expanded: approximately 1.3 million projects failed in 2024, whereas only 2,584 failures were recorded in 2021, reflecting the rapid expansion of project numbers and risk accumulation in the recent cycle.

Overall, Meme coins are more likely to “rise and fall first” amid volatility. These tokens often rely on social hype rather than real use cases, making them more vulnerable when market sentiment reverses. Besides macroeconomic factors, rapid supply expansion is also a key factor. GeckoTerminal data shows that the number of tradable tokens in the market surged from about 3 million at the end of 2024 to nearly 20 million by the end of 2025.

Lee attributes this change to the proliferation of low-threshold token issuance tools, especially within the Solana ecosystem. After the launch of pump.fun in early 2024, the cost of issuing new tokens dropped significantly, leading to a flood of projects with very short lifespans and lacking sustainable development capabilities, which further increased the failure rate in subsequent periods.

It is worth noting that despite the large number of projects exiting in 2025, the Meme coin sector showed signs of rebound in early 2026. Data from CoinMarketCap indicates that the market capitalization of this sector rose from about $38 billion at the end of last December to $47.7 billion in early January this year, then fell back to around $43.7 billion, with trading volume once multiplying several times. The phased strength of tokens like PEPE, BONK, and FLOKI has also sparked ongoing discussions about whether they are short-term speculative assets or a sign of a new wave of altcoin rotations.