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What happens when you die\u2026and you\u2019re a cryptocurrency? Because deaths of this sort have been happening in record numbers lately. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s perhaps no better way to illustrate what you learn in the first minute of economics 101. Something no one wants has no market value. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s economic death. <\/p>\n
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\u201453.2%\u2014have ceased active trading. They\u2019re dead. <\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, 11.6 million of the token failures recorded by CoinGecko\u201486.3%\u2014happened last year. In other words, 2025 was a mass die-off.<\/p>\n
Incidentally, 2025 was the year Pump.fun, a disturbingly glib \u201cdecentralized social casino\u201d overtly dedicated to creating cryptocurrencies cheaply and easily on the spur of the moment, went super viral. In its early days, Pump.fun featured \u201ca 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,\u201d Matthew Gault wrote on Gizmodo.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s not hard to come up with some wild guesses as to just how all these deaths of currencies happened. It\u2019s been an era of zero-effort memecoins, spurred in part by a leader of the U.S. who describes himself as the \u201ccrypto president.\u201d<\/p>\n
One-off joke coins that never came with any expectation of being anyone\u2019s long-term investment don\u2019t 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\u2019s proverbial bag of coins at some point, and each corpse is evidence that someone\u2014maybe a sucker who got grifted, but maybe just the creator who had a private chuckle\u2014got stuck holding it.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n