Everyone in crypto argues about which token. Almost nobody looks at the base rate. CoinGecko tracked every to…

Everyone in crypto argues about which token. Almost nobody looks at the base rate. CoinGecko tracked every token that entered the market between mid-2021 and the end of 2025. 20.2 million of them. 53.2% are no longer actively traded. Not down. Not underperforming. Gone. The timing is the part that surprised me. 11.6 million of those deaths happened in 2025 alone, which is 86% of every token death across five years compressed into twelve months. The October 2025 liquidation, a record 19 billion dollars in a single day, was followed by 7.7 million tokens disappearing over the next three months. Then there is the launchpad math. On https://pump.fun through 2025, the share of tokens that ever completed their bonding curve ran between 0.4% and 1.8%. Round it generously and call it 1 in 100. Now look at what "graduating" actually means. It means the token reached a market cap somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 dollars. That is the bar. Ninety-nine percent of launches never clear a hundred thousand dollar market cap, let alone become anything. Three things I take from this. Survivorship bias isn't a subtle effect here, it's the whole picture. Every chart you see is drawn from the 46.8% that lived. The denominator is missing by default. Being early is not an edge on its own. Being early to 20 million things means being early to more than 10 million zeros. The edge has to come from somewhere other than timing. The distribution has the same shape as public equities, just far more extreme. In stocks, most of the return comes from a few percent of companies. In crypto, most tokens don't survive long enough to have a return at all. None of this says the asset class doesn't work. It says the average outcome and the visible outcome are two very different numbers, and only one of them ever shows up on your timeline. Sources: CoinGecko token failure data 2021-2025. https://pump.fun graduation rates, 2025. Not investment advice.