CoinGecko Logs 20.2M Tokens Since 2021 as Count Estimates Diverge

An Instagram slide circulating this weekend sets two numbers against each other: 3.1 million cryptocurrencies in 2021, and 52.3 million projected for 2026. Its author argues that picking a strong project and holding it no longer works, because too many coins are chasing a fixed pool of liquidity. Neither figure carries a named source, and no published dataset matched either at the time of writing. The trackers that do publish counts tell a similar story in different arithmetic. CoinGecko put 20.2 million tokens on the market between mid-2021 and the end of 2025, a figure CoinDesk reported on 14 January.

The post's two numbers

The slide is unsourced. Its 2021 figure of 3.1 million sits far above any count of listed coins for that year and well below the number of contracts ever deployed. CoinLedger's research, updated on 9 December, counted 4,154 listed coins in January 2021 and 8,714 by January 2022. CoinGecko's study starts its own tally in mid-2021 and publishes no standing total for that date. So 3.1 million stands unverified, carried here as the post author's claim and nobody else's. The same holds for 52.3 million.

Five trackers, five totals

Five sources give five answers. Finbold reported on 2 September that CoinMarketCap was tracking 59.08 million tokens, up from 23.45 million on 4 September 2025, a rise of 151.94% in a year. Tangem's April update put CoinMarketCap's count of active cryptocurrencies, meaning those it prices and ranks, at 8,949, and separately cited more than 120 million unique tokens ever created. The Motley Fool's guide says the number "exceeded 37 million" without naming a source or a date. None of these is wrong on its own terms, because none is measuring the same thing. This desk has been here before, when two security trackers counted the same August and published different loss totals.

Most of what was created is already gone

The CoinGecko study reported in January is the sturdiest number in the story. Of the 20.2 million tokens launched from mid-2021, 53.2%, or about 10.7 million, were no longer actively traded by the end of 2025. The report tied the surge to launchpads that turned a new token into a few clicks of work.

"These platforms lowered the barrier to entry for token creation, leading to a wave of speculative assets with little or no development backing," CoinGecko analyst Shaun Paul Lee said.

One figure in that same reporting does not sit with the rest. The study puts 11.6 million failures in 2025 alone, or 86.3% of every token death it recorded, while the cumulative failure count since mid-2021 is given as 10.7 million. Both cannot be right as published, and we could not establish which supersedes which. The quarterly concentration is not in dispute. Some 7.7 million of the failures landed in the last three months of 2025, after the 10 October liquidation cascade wiped out $19 billion in leveraged positions.

What a thinner market does to the rest

The complaint underneath the post is about liquidity, not arithmetic. More tokens against the same money means thinner order books, and thin books show up in exchange data long before they show up in a price chart. The XRP Ledger gave a version of that this year, with order-book volume rising 79% while the number of traders fell. Whether 52.3 million is the right total for 2026 matters less than the direction every source agrees on. The count keeps climbing while the survival rate falls. No two trackers agree on either.