Why a historic 13M crypto projects have failed while Bitcoin skeptics insist “anyone can create a token”

Bitcoin developer, Jameson Lopp, made a straightforward remark a few days after CoinGecko released its report on dead coins for 2025.

Uninformed individuals assert that Bitcoin lacks scarcity because anyone can create their own cryptocurrency. They overlook the fact that while anyone can duplicate code, no one can replicate a network of users and its supporting infrastructure.

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This timing highlighted a tension that has influenced the crypto space since the inception of the first Bitcoin fork. The issuance of tokens has always been plentiful, as creating a new coin takes mere minutes rather than months.

However, CoinGecko’s most recent dataset transformed the argument of “anyone can launch” into a quantifiable matter: 53.2% of the tokens monitored on GeckoTerminal from July 2021 through December 2025 are now inactive, signifying approximately 13.4 million failures out of 25.2 million listed.

In 2025 alone, 11.6 million of those failures occurred, accounting for 86.3% of the total failures in the dataset.
This was not a gradual decline. The last quarter of 2025 witnessed 7.7 million tokens becoming inactive, averaging about 83,700 failures daily. For comparison, 2024 saw 1.38 million failures throughout the entire year.

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The increase was significant: the death toll in 2025 was 8.4 times greater than that of 2024, compressing what appeared to be multi-year turnover into a single year. CoinGecko links much of the spike in the fourth quarter to the October 10 leverage washout, which eliminated $19 billion in leveraged positions, instigating what the firm describes as a historic decline.

The overall crypto market capitalization dropped 10.4% year-over-year to approximately $3 trillion, with the fourth quarter alone down 23.7%. Bitcoin fell by 6.4% while gold increased by 62.6%, highlighting the macro risk-off pressure that impacted speculative assets the hardest.

Over half of the 25.2 million cryptocurrencies listed on GeckoTerminal since 2021 have failed, with 11.6 million dying in 2025 alone.

Scarcity isn’t about the code

Lopp’s perspective clarifies a conceptual misunderstanding. The scarcity of Bitcoin does not hinge on the complexity of writing software, but rather on the challenge of uniting individuals around a set of rules they mutually decide not to alter.

While forking Bitcoin’s code is simple, altering the social consensus that grants it credibility as neutral money is not. The data on dead coins highlights this distinction.

Millions of tokens have been launched, many leveraging low-friction platforms like Pump.fun or launchpad ecosystems that reduced issuance costs to nearly nothing.

The number of projects tracked by GeckoTerminal surged from 428,383 in 2021 to over 20.2 million by the end of 2025. Yet, the survival rate plummeted.

What CoinGecko categorizes as “dead” is explicitly linked to trading activity: tokens that once had at least one trade but are no longer actively exchanged. This definition narrows the dataset to tokens that met a basic existence threshold, filtering out purely minted tokens that were never traded.

Even with this filter, the failure rate remained above 50%. The challenge was not in launching, but in maintaining liquidity and attention long enough for a token to matter.

This directly correlates with what renders Bitcoin’s network scarce.

The asset enjoys a compounding moat: a security budget supported by miners processing over a decade of transactions, a global network of exchanges and custody providers, derivatives markets sufficiently deep to accommodate institutional hedging, payment systems integrated into merchant infrastructure, and a developer ecosystem that regards protocol stability as a feature rather than a flaw.

Competitors can duplicate the code, but they cannot replicate the established user base or the credible commitment to not opportunistically change the rules. Network effects expand nonlinearly, a concept formalized in Metcalfe’s Law-style models that associate network value with the square of active participants.

The implication is clear: leading networks capture disproportionate value, and most newcomers never reach escape velocity.

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When liquidity meets stress

The die-off in 2025 was not solely due to oversupply.

CoinGecko’s yearly market overview indicates a system under macro pressure. Stablecoins grew by 48.9% to surpass $311 billion in circulation, adding $102.1 billion even as speculative assets faltered. Centralized exchange perpetual volumes reached $86.2 trillion, an increase of 47.4%, while decentralized perpetual volumes soared to $6.7 trillion, rising by 346%.

The infrastructure for settlement and leverage continued to expand, but the number of tokens engaged in that activity sharply narrowed.

This creates a bifurcated scenario. Tokens that served settlement purposes or garnered genuine trading interest thrived, while those dependent on hype cycles or thin liquidity were crushed when risk appetite waned.

October’s liquidation event served as a stress test, revealing which projects had real demand and which existed merely as placeholders in speculative portfolios.

The failure rate in the fourth quarter suggests that most tokens fell into the latter category: assets launched with the expectation that attention and liquidity would follow but failed to establish enough distribution or incentive alignment to endure a downturn.

CoinGecko’s methodology excludes tokens that never traded and counts only those from Pump.fun graduates, indicating that the actual number of minted-but-failed tokens is likely greater. The 13.4 million failures represent the subset that managed to register activity before becoming dormant.

The broader takeaway is clear: getting listed is easy, but remaining relevant is the real filter.

Token failures surged from approximately 15,000 to over 83,000 daily following the October 10, 2025 liquidation cascade that triggered widespread market stress.

What comes next

If 2025 establishes a baseline for token mortality during stress, the trajectory for 2026 will depend on whether issuance patterns change or if the same dynamics continue.

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Three scenarios outline the possibilities.

The first scenario posits that high turnover persists. Low-friction launchpads remain prevalent, speculative issuance stays inexpensive, and another liquidity shock leads to 8 million to 15 million failures. This pathway mirrors the structure of 2025, where abundant issuance meets limited demand, treating last year’s extinction event as a recurrent outcome rather than an anomaly.

The second scenario anticipates consolidation. Market participants will demand deeper liquidity and longer histories.

Platforms will tighten listing standards, traders will concentrate in fewer venues, and failure counts will decrease to 3 million to 7 million as quality filters take effect. This pathway assumes that the harsh selection pressure of 2025 taught the market to evaluate survival risk more accurately, diminishing the appetite for tokens lacking distribution or infrastructure.

The third scenario combines new issuance with sharper bifurcation. New distribution methods, such as wallet-integrated launches, social trading incentives, and layer-two expansions, will drive issuance higher, but only a small fraction will achieve genuine network effects.

Failures will fall within the 6 million to 12 million range, with an even steeper winner-take-most distribution than what was seen in 2025.

The ranges are not forecasts but plausible limits based on observed quarterly volatility and the 2024 baseline. The 7.7 million failures in last year’s fourth quarter signify a stress-quarter ceiling, while 2024’s 1.38 million provide a lower threshold for non-extreme conditions.

The actual result will hinge on macroeconomic conditions, platform incentives, and whether the market learns from or repeats the lessons of 2025.

Three scenarios for 2026 project token failures ranging from 3 million to 15 million, in comparison to 2025’s 11.6 million and 2024’s 1.38 million.

The network can’t be cloned

Lopp’s statement regarding copying code versus replicating networks resonates more deeply in light of CoinGecko’s findings. Bitcoin’s scarcity is not jeopardized by the presence of millions of alternative tokens; rather, it is strengthened by the high failure rate of those alternatives.

Each failed coin symbolizes an attempt to duplicate the network effects, credibility, and infrastructure that took Bitcoin over a decade to establish. Most could not sustain trading for even a year.

The data from 2025 quantifies what crypto participants have intuitively grasped: while issuance is plentiful, survival is rare. Macro stress hastened the sorting process, but the fundamental dynamic existed prior to October’s liquidation cascade.

Tokens that lacked distribution, liquidity depth, or ongoing incentive alignment were filtered out. Meanwhile, the foundational infrastructure continued to expand, concentrating activity in assets and facilities that proved resilient.

Bitcoin’s advantage is not its codebase. It’s the credible, liquid, and infrastructure-rich network that rivals can launch against but cannot replicate.

The code is accessible. The network comes at a significant cost.

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