Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp recently threw a wet blanket on the "anyone can launch a token" crowd, citing CoinGecko’s 2025 report as the source of the fire. The data confirms a brutal truth: while anyone can indeed launch a token, anyone can also watch that token die a slow, lonely death on the blockchain.
The numbers are staggering, and not in a good way. The total tracked project count exploded from roughly 428,000 in 2021 to over 20.2 million by the end of 2025. But the survival rate? It collapsed faster than a meme coin during a market dump. CoinGecko defines 'dead' as tokens that once had trading activity but are now dormant, filtering out the projects that never even got off the starting line. Even with that generous filter, the failure rate stayed above 50%, resulting in 13.4 million projects going to the great graveyard in the sky.
Lopp’s point cuts through the noise: Bitcoin’s scarcity isn’t about the difficulty of writing code—forking Bitcoin is trivial, like copy-pasting a Wikipedia page. It’s about the impossibility of forking the social consensus, the decade-long security budget, and the entrenched network effects that make it neutral money. While low-friction platforms like Pump.fun reduced issuance costs to near zero, they couldn't manufacture liquidity or attention out of thin air.
The 2025 die-off coincided with a macro stress test that shook out the weak hands. While stablecoins swelled to $311 billion and leverage volumes hit record highs, the market bifurcated. Tokens that actually served a settlement function or captured real trading interest survived; the rest, relying on thin liquidity and hype, got crushed like a bug on a windshield.
So, what’s next? The report suggests three plausible scenarios for 2026: high churn (another 8-15 million failures), consolidation (3-7 million failures as quality filters tighten), or a winner-take-most expansion (6-12 million failures with even steeper distribution). It’s basically a choose-your-own-adventure of crypto Darwinism.
The takeaway is simple: getting listed is easy, but surviving a liquidity drawdown is the real filter. The 2025 data quantifies what Bitcoiners knew intuitively—issuance is abundant, but survival is scarce. The code is free; the network costs everything.
