How Long Do New Crypto Tokens Last? Live Survival Data by Chain (2026)

You have probably seen the headline that most new tokens are already dead. The widely quoted figure that 97 percent of memecoins have stopped existing comes from an August 2024 study, and the often cited "more than half of all crypto has failed" number is a year-end snapshot. Useful, but stale. The Token Survival Index above answers the same question with live on-chain data: of the tokens launched recently, how many are still actually being traded right now? The figure refreshes automatically.

Read it as a live snapshot, not a verdict on any single project. In our latest reading, roughly a third of tokens that are about 24 hours old still show real trading volume, and that share drops to almost nothing by the time tokens are a week old. The headline hides an enormous split by chain, which is where the interesting part begins.

Survival varies massively by chain

At 24 hours old, the share of tokens still actively traded ranges from the low single digits to the large majority depending on where they launched. In the live index, Solana sits at the top by a wide margin, with Base, BNB Chain, Arbitrum and Polygon in the middle, and Ethereum at the bottom. The spread between the most and least active chain at the same age is more than tenfold.

This is not a quality ranking of the chains themselves. It reflects what kind of tokens launch where. Chains with very cheap, near-instant deployment attract an enormous volume of low-effort and bot launches alongside the real ones, so the raw stream contains a lot of tokens that were never meant to trade for long. Higher fee chains see fewer launches overall, and a different mix. The per-chain bars in the index update with the market, so check the current numbers rather than memorising them.

The zombie gap: liquidity outlives trading

Here is the part no other tracker measures. When you split "still has liquidity" from "still actively traded", the two numbers diverge sharply as tokens age. Active trading collapses within days, but a meaningful slice of older tokens still hold a funded liquidity pool. In other words, most quiet tokens are not delisted or removed. Their pool is still live, the contract still works, and yet almost no one is trading them. These are zombie tokens.

The gap matters for anyone scanning a chart. A token can look alive because it shows liquidity, while its real trading activity has gone to zero. Liquidity present is not the same as a market present. The index shows both lines so you can see the gap directly. One honest caveat: the liquidity figure for older tokens should be read as an upper bound, because the data source may not surface every pool that has fully drained, which can tilt the older sample toward survivors.

How to check if a token is a zombie before you buy

A market average never tells you about the specific token in front of you. Before touching any token, do three quick checks:

• Compare live 24 hour volume against liquidity. If a token shows liquidity but almost no recent volume, it is trading like a zombie regardless of how the chart looks.
• Run the contract through the DEXTools Token Safety Checker to see its own honeypot, mint and ownership status before you assume the quiet is harmless.
• Use the manual checklist in our guide on how to spot a rug pull, which separates a sudden liquidity pull from the slow fade this index measures.

For the wider picture, the New Token Tracker shows how many tokens are launching right now, the New Token Risk Index shows how many launch with negligible liquidity, and the Rug and Scam Rate Index shows how many carry a critical safety flag. Together they describe the launch stream from birth to silence. For the human side of the same pattern, see our reads on the weekend survival test and the life cycle of a memecoin.

How we measure this

The index is a cross-sectional snapshot, not a tracked cohort. For each major chain we sample tokens that are currently about 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days old, then check each token's current trading activity and liquidity from DEXTools pair data. "Still actively traded" means at least 100 dollars of real volume in the last 24 hours. "Holds liquidity" means at least 1,000 dollars in the pool. Figures refresh roughly every two hours.

Three honest limits come with this method. First, the 24 hour, 7 day and 30 day figures are three separate samples of different tokens measured at one moment, so the differences cannot be read as the same tokens decaying over time. Second, the sample is the raw launch stream surfaced by the API, including spam and bot deployments that were never meant to trade, so the numbers describe the quality of the firehose, not the failure rate of vetted projects. Third, a 24 hour volume window is a strict definition of alive that undercounts tokens trading only weekly, and the older liquidity figure may lean toward survivors. Treat the per-chain breakdown as the reliable cut and any pooled average as illustrative. This page is information only and is not financial advice.