More than 11.6 million tokens listed on GeckoTerminal stopped active trading in 2025, after a year of memecoin losses and market turbulence, according to a research report by Shaun Paul Lee.
The Oct. 10 market crash, which liquidated over $19 billion in crypto leverage in a single day, was cited as a key catalyst.
The fourth quarter of 2025 was especially severe, with 7.7 million tokens ceasing active trading during that period. Failures jumped from 1.3 million in 2024 and just 2,584 in 2021.
“This sharp decline in token survivability may be linked to the broader market turbulence throughout the year, which particularly affected the memecoin sector,” the report said.
The total number of tokens listed rose sharply, from about 3 million at the end of 2024 to roughly 20 million by the end of 2025. The researcher pointed to the January 2024 launch of the Solana memecoin launchpad pump.fun as a driver of the surge in low-effort memecoins.
“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.”
Memecoins rallied into 2026, with market capitalization climbing from $38 billion on Dec. 29 to $47.7 billion by Jan. 5 before cooling to about $43.7 billion, per CoinMarketCap data. Transaction volumes jumped roughly 300%, from $2.17 billion to $8.7 billion, and later settled near $3.7 billion with a daily gain exceeding 34%.
Memecoins remain high-risk, and their performance can signal how much risk investors are willing to take.
