Crypto Memecoins Face Record Failures in 2025

Memecoins Crisis of 2025

2025 has proven to be an extremely challenging year for the crypto market, especially for memecoins, with over 11.6 million tokens failing—setting a negative record for a single year. According to a report by research analyst Shaun Paul Lee from CoinGecko, the last quarter of the previous year was particularly grim, with 7.7 million tokens listed on GeckoTerminal ceasing to trade actively.

The market crash on October 10, which led to over $19 billion in crypto leverage being liquidated in a single day, has been identified as a key factor in this drastic decline in token survivability. Lee pointed out that this sharp drop could be linked to the general market turbulence that year, affecting the memecoins sector especially hard.

Compared to previous years, the number of failures has skyrocketed; in 2024, over 1.3 million projects failed, and in 2021 only 2,584 did. Last year alone, more than 11.6 million tokens listed on GeckoTerminal went inactive.

Impact of Memecoin Launches

Another reason for the high failure rate is the immense volume of coins created in 2025, reaching 20 million by year-end, compared to 3 million at the end of 2024. Lee cites the launch of pump.fun, a launchpad for memecoins on Solana, in January 2024, as a major factor contributing to this flood of new projects.

These launchpads have made token creation extraordinarily easy, leading to an avalanche of memecoins and low-quality projects entering the market. Before the launch of pump.fun, the number of failures in cryptocurrencies was in the range of several hundred thousand. However, between 2021 and 2023, project failures accounted for only 3.4% of all crypto failures in the last five years.

Market Cap for Memecoins in 2026

Memecoins had a promising start at the beginning of 2026, with market capitalization rising from $38 billion on December 29, 2025, to $47.7 billion by January 5, before stabilizing around $43.7 billion. During the same period, transaction volumes for memecoins surged by 300%, jumping from $2.17 billion to $8.7 billion.

However, the transaction volume was estimated at $3.69 billion on Monday, marking an increase of over 34% that day.