Because of the turmoil within the digital forex market, the variety of meme cash decreased sharply final 12 months particularly, and the variety of failed digital forex initiatives exceeded 11.6 million in 2025, the very best degree in a single 12 months.
The fourth quarter of 2025 was the worst interval, with 7.7 million tokens listed on the Gecko terminal ceasing energetic buying and selling in the course of the interval, based on a report revealed Friday by CoinGecko analysis analyst Sean Paul Lee.
Lee stated the October 10 market crash, during which greater than $19 billion of crypto leverage was liquidated in in the future, was a key set off.
“This sharp decline in token viability could also be associated to the widespread market turmoil all year long, which significantly affected the memecoin sector,” he added.
Lee stated the variety of failures had skyrocketed from the earlier 12 months. In 2024, over 1.3 million initiatives listed on Geckoterminal failed, whereas in 2021, solely 2,584 initiatives failed.
Greater than 11.6 million tokens listed on CoinGecko’s Gecko terminal ceased energetic buying and selling final 12 months. sauce: CoinGecko
Memecoin is likely one of the riskiest bets in cryptocurrencies, and its success or failure could be an indicator of how a lot danger buyers are keen to take.
Meme coin launchpads flood the market
One more reason for the excessive token failure fee could possibly be that a considerable amount of cash have been created in 2025 in comparison with different years.
In line with Geckoterminal, there have been 3 million tokens listed on the finish of 2024, and 20 million on the finish of 2025.
Lee factors to the launch of Solana meme coin Launchpad Pump.enjoyable in January 2024 as a driving pressure behind the plethora of latest initiatives.
“The benefit of launching tokens on a launch pad has led to a proliferation of low-effort meme cash and market entry initiatives,” he stated.
“Previous to the launch of pump.enjoyable in 2024, the variety of crypto failures was within the low six digits. Challenge failures from 2021 to 2023 accounted for simply 3.4% of all crypto failures over the previous 5 years.”
Meme coin market capitalization will rise in direction of 2026
Meme cash are off to a robust begin this 12 months, with their market capitalization hovering from $38 billion on Dec. 29 to $47.7 billion by Jan. 5, earlier than cooling to about $43.7 billion as of Monday, based on CoinMarketCap.
Associated: Meme coin loses momentum, Pump.enjoyable hits lowest month-to-month income in 2025
Throughout the identical interval, memecoin buying and selling quantity surged 300% from $2.17 billion to $8.7 billion. Buying and selling quantity on Monday was roughly $3.69 billion. Nonetheless, the indicator for the day recorded a rise of greater than 34%.
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