What happens when you die…and you’re a cryptocurrency? Because deaths of this sort have been happening in record numbers lately.
The most famous death of a cryptocurrency is probably TerraUSD which, along with sister token Luna, plunged in value from its $1 peg to 14 cents over the course of one chaotic week, and then kept dropping to about 2 cents, where it has mostly stayed ever since.
This is how currencies die. TerraUSD was renamed USTC, and trades have happened from time to time for whatever reason at various tiny fractions of a dollar. Nothing is truly worth nothing, and technologically speaking, a dead cryptocurrency that is still on a usable blockchain can often still be transferred on the off chance someone is willing to lift a finger. But there’s perhaps no better way to illustrate what you learn in the first minute of economics 101. Something no one wants has no market value.
That’s economic death.
With that in mind, a recent report from CoinGecko (via CoinDesk) says the crypto reaper has been unusually busy lately. Looking at its own records from as far back as 2021, CoinGecko found that 20.2 million tokens had been placed on the market, and that the majority—53.2%—have ceased active trading. They’re dead.
What’s more, 11.6 million of the token failures recorded by CoinGecko—86.3%—happened last year. In other words, 2025 was a mass die-off.
Incidentally, 2025 was the year Pump.fun, a disturbingly glib “decentralized social casino” overtly dedicated to creating cryptocurrencies cheaply and easily on the spur of the moment, went super viral. In its early days, Pump.fun featured “a guy who smokes meth on stream, a drunk lawyer who gives shitty legal advice that degenerates the longer the stream goes on, and a guy promising not to sleep until his coin hits a $10 million market cap,” Matthew Gault wrote on Gizmodo.
So it’s not hard to come up with some wild guesses as to just how all these deaths of currencies happened. It’s been an era of zero-effort memecoins, spurred in part by a leader of the U.S. who describes himself as the “crypto president.”
One-off joke coins that never came with any expectation of being anyone’s long-term investment don’t die in exactly the same catastrophic way as TerraUSD. They just freeze at whatever point they stopped being funny, and get abandoned. Nonetheless, each dead currency was somebody’s proverbial bag of coins at some point, and each corpse is evidence that someone—maybe a sucker who got grifted, but maybe just the creator who had a private chuckle—got stuck holding it.
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