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🥛 The crypto death toll is at 50% 💀

🥛 The crypto death toll is at 50% 💀

PLUS: Why memecoins are here to stay 🤝

Chevy Cassar
May 02, 2025

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GM. This is Milk Road – the newsletter that helps you sniff out the 0.01% of crypto tokens that will survive long term.

Here’s what we got for you today:

✍️ Why memecoins are here to stay
✍️ The crypto death toll is at 50%
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Is Base Stealing Ethereum’s Future? w/ Michael Nadeau
🍪 Ripple tried to buy out Circle!?

Prices as of 2:00 PM ET. Click here for our Fear & Greed Index.

WHY MEMECOINS ARE HERE TO STAY 🤝

Bad news: we don’t have access to the Blockworks Research team.
Good news: our friend Katherine Ross (writer of the Empire newsletter) does.

And today, Katherine is tapping insights from the team to lay out why – despite the collapse in volume and sentiment – memecoins are here to stay!

Katherine, take it away…

Source: Imgflip

Memecoins are like moths:

Short lifespans, yes, but they tend to leave a mark.

And according to Ryan Connor, Head of Research at Blockworks and all-round big-brain, that’s a good thing.

The short lifespan of your average memecoin actually works in the broader sector’s favor:

Source: @_ryanrconnor

At the Q1 peak, memecoins represented about 25% of the crypto market’s overall volumes – and despite the recent one-two punch of both a downturn in volumes and in sentiment…

It looks like memecoin activity is already starting to see a bounce-back over the past month!

Source: Blockworks Research

But is this a good thing, or do memecoins detract from crypto (hurting its rep)?

Again, I defer to Ryan (remember: big-brain) who simply says “no”, memecoins are “empirically what’s working” if you’re looking at the data.

And digging further into the similarities between memecoins and sports betting, you can start to see how both forms of speculation have a social aspect and feedback loop that helps to drive further adoption:

You’ve got folks who get really into it → they share stories of their gains → discuss strategies with their friends → which only helps to bring more people into the space…

And while we’re nowhere near sports-gambling-levels-of-adoption just yet – given time and amplification, that could well change.

Either way, one thing is clear right now:

Memecoins are here to stay.

…pssst…Chevy here again. Want more from Katherine and the Blockworks team? Join the Empire newsletter – they pull back the curtain on the biggest decisions in crypto, every morning!

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COTD: HALF OF ALL TOKENS LAUNCHED SINCE 2021 ARE NOW DEAD 📊

Need the moth-like life spans of most memecoins visualized?

Say. No. More.

Here’s a chart created by CoinGecko that tracks the total crypto death toll by year, between 2021 and 2025.

(The chart shows tokens/coins that are no longer being traded, grouped by the last year they had an active trade.)

…notice how the rise of memecoin popularity in 2024/2025 is reflected in an increased crypto death toll in 2025? 👇

Source: CoinGecko

Here’s a rapid fire list of ‘BIG YIKES’ moments we had as we ran through some back of the napkin math on this…

1/ 2022 and 2024 saw the highest year-on-year death rate increases.

Between 2021 and 2022, the crypto death toll rose by ~82x, and between 2023 and 2024 it rose by 5.5x.

2/ We saw more crypto tokens die in the first 3 months of 2025 than we did in ALL of 2024.

Put another way: 49.7% of all token deaths (ever) happened this year.

Our armchair detective’s guess at who’s responsible for the carnage? PumpFun

3/ Token deaths as a percentage of launches went from 0.6% to 94% over a 4-5 year period!

The total amount of token deaths in 2021 (2,584) as a percent of total launches in that same year (428,383) was 0.60%

Meanwhile, the total number of token deaths so far in 2025 (1.8M) as a percent of total launches to-date (1.9M) is 94%!

The takeaway here? Our ‘99.9% of tokens are going to $0’ theory is (so far) playing out on schedule.

P.S. You know what acts as a sort of ‘life support’ for high risk tokens?

Macro conditions.

If macro is loosening (aka: money is easier/cheaper to access/borrow globally), high-risk assets tend to flourish.

So what’s the current state of macro? We sat down with macro legend Jordy Visser on yesterday’s episode of The Milk Road Show, to talk:

Investment sentiment & tariff paralysis
Are we witnessing a collapse of trust in the dollar?
The best case and worst case scenarios for crypto in 2025

Plus so much more! Click below to check it out. 👇

YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

KYLE STARTED A FIGHT (BITCOIN VS. GOLD)

Source: Imgflip

Ok, ok – “fight” is probably a bit of an overstatement – it’s more of a ‘respectful debate’ than anything else…

But did you used to go behind the gymnasium after school to watch two kids ‘respectfully debate’?

NO. You went to watch a fight. So that’s what we’ll be calling it.

Kyle Reidhead (our Head of Research) is joining a webinar fight on Tuesday May 6th (12:00pm ET) to debate gold vs $BTC with Peter Grosskopf (from Argo).

Your referee for the afternoon: Herb Dean Eric Cantor, from Vincent.

You don’t want to miss it! (There will be polite disagreement blood).

👉 Register for the free webinar here!