The most famous demise of the cryptocurrency is probably TerraUSD, which, along with sister token Luna, fell from its $1 peg to 14 cents during a chaotic week, and then continued falling to about 2 cents, where it has mostly stayed since.
This is how currencies die. TerraUSD was renamed USTC, and for whatever reason continues to trade at various small fractions of the dollar from time to time. Nothing is really anything, and technically speaking, a dead cryptocurrency that is still on a usable blockchain can often still be transferred if someone is willing to lay a finger on it. But there’s probably no better way to illustrate what you learn in the first minute of Economics 101. What no one wants has no market value.
That is economic death.
With this in mind, a recent report from CoinGecko (via CoinDesk) states that Crypto Reaper has been unusually busy recently. Looking at its own records going back to 2021, CoinGecko found that 20.2 million tokens were placed on the market, and the majority of them – 53.2% – have ceased active trading. They are dead.
Additionally, 11.6 million token failures recorded by CoinGecko – 86.3% – occurred last year. In other words, 2025 was a year of mass death.
Coincidentally, 2025 was the year that Pump.Fun, a disturbingly shiny “decentralized social casino” dedicated to openly minting cryptocurrencies cheap and easy, went super viral. In its early days, Pump.Fun featured “a guy who smokes meth on stream, a drunk lawyer who gives bad legal advice when the stream goes on too long, and a guy who promises not to sleep until his coin reaches a $10 million market cap,” Matthew Gault wrote on Gizmodo.
So it’s not hard to make some wild guesses as to how all these currency deaths happened. This has been the era of zero-effort memecoins, partly inspired by a US leader who describes himself as the “Crypto President”.
Outright joke coins that were never invented with the expectation of being anyone’s long-term investment don’t die in the same devastating manner as TerraUSD. At whatever point they stop being funny, they stop there and are discarded. Still, each dead pose was someone’s proverbial bag of coins at some point, and each corpse is proof that someone – perhaps a sucker who became disgusting, but perhaps just the creator who had a private laugh – was stuck holding it.
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