New data reveals a dramatic and unprecedented wave of cryptocurrency project failures, with a staggering 11.6 million digital assets collapsing in 2024 alone. According to a comprehensive report from Unfolded citing analytics from CoinGecko, this figure represents a massive 86.3% of all such failures recorded since tracking began in 2021. The data further indicates that 53.2% of all cryptocurrencies ever listed on CoinGecko are now considered defunct, painting a stark picture of the market's rapid consolidation.
The report, published in March 2025, analyzes the key drivers behind this surge. Analysts point to the end of an era of cheap capital, increased global regulatory scrutiny, and a sustained bear market that exposed projects lacking genuine utility or sustainable tokenomics. This failure rate is compared to the dot-com bubble, signaling a necessary market cleansing where substance triumphs over hype, ultimately benefiting the long-term credibility of blockchain technology.
Concurrently, a separate event underscored a critical vulnerability in the Web3 space. Tiger Research, a prominent Asian blockchain analytics firm, published a report detailing the sudden implosion of the Information Finance (InfoFi) ecosystem in January 2025. The collapse, which included projects like Kaito, was triggered not by a blockchain failure but by a single policy change on the social media platform X.
On January 15, 2025, X announced it would no longer permit applications that reward users for posting content. This decision immediately severed the primary user acquisition channel for numerous InfoFi projects, which had built complex incentive models atop X's social graph. Tiger Research's analysis shows the ecosystem crumbled within 72 hours, serving as a canonical case study in "platform risk." The event exposed the fatal flaw of building decentralized economies on centralized infrastructure, forcing a re-examination of what true decentralization means in practice.
The firm suggests the core concept of incentivizing valuable information is not dead and predicts the emergence of an "InfoFi 2.0." Future projects are expected to learn from these mistakes by diversifying across multiple platforms, designing quality-based incentive models, and enhancing user data sovereignty to build more resilient systems.
