Why a record 13M crypto projects are now dead as Bitcoin critics still claim “anyone can launch a token”
Bitcoin developer, Jameson Lopp, posted a simple observation days after CoinGecko published its 2025 dead coins report.
Ignorant folks claim that Bitcoin isn’t scarce because anyone can launch their own cryptocurrency. They fail to recognize that while anyone can copy code, no one can copy a network of users and infrastructure.
The timing crystallized a tension that’s shaped crypto since the first Bitcoin fork. Token issuance has always been abundant, as spinning up a new coin takes minutes, not months.
But CoinGecko’s latest dataset turned the “anyone can launch” argument into something measurable: 53.2% of tokens tracked on GeckoTerminal between July 2021 and December 2025 are now inactive, representing roughly 13.4 million failures…
