Token Count: how many crypto tokens exist

Token Count answers a simple question: how many crypto tokens exist? A token is a coin that lives on someone else's blockchain, such as a stablecoin or a memecoin on Solana or Base. Anyone can create one in minutes, so the number is far bigger than the few thousand coins you see on exchange listings. An altcoin is any crypto coin other than Bitcoin; the glossary has a short definition of altcoin season if the term is new to you.

At the top you see the total number of tokens created, with a green label for how many were added in the last 12 full months and how that compares with the year before. Next to it are a few key figures, such as how much of all crypto value sits in the top 125 coins. Below them is one chart with two views. "Total so far" is the running count of tokens created since 2017. "New per month" shows how many appeared in each month, stacked by blockchain, so you can hover a bar and see which chain caused a spike. Each blockchain has its own colour. Under the chart, a table lists every chain with its number of tokens, its share of the total, how many tokens it added in the last 12 full months, how that compares with the 12 months before, and a small chart of new tokens per month over the last two years. A "Compare with" menu lays another series over the chart: TOTAL2 (the market cap of all coins except Bitcoin and stablecoins, same series as the Dominance page, from June 2020), TOTAL2 per token created, the Bitcoin price, ETH/BTC, the Nvidia share price as a rough stand-in for AI enthusiasm, the stablecoin supply, the Fear & Greed index, or Google search interest in ChatGPT, AI, memecoin, altcoin and crypto (a snapshot, worldwide, scaled 0 to 100 per term). An "Events" button marks a few moments such as the Terra and FTX collapses. Under the chart one sentence in plain words says how the monthly growth of new tokens relates to monthly growth of the chosen series, in the same month or shifted by up to six months (hover the sentence for the correlation number). The sentence only says "Likely" or "Possible" link when the match is stronger than what randomly shifted copies of the same series would show; otherwise it says there is no clear link. It is exploratory: a few market cycles leave little independent data, so it hints at a link but does not prove one.

The running total only goes up, so look at its slope. A flat line means few new tokens, a steep line means many. The monthly view shows the same thing as bars, which makes busy months easy to spot. The newest month in the data may be unfinished. The chart shades it and the page leaves it out of its growth numbers. Further down, "How many are still alive?" is a band that narrows from large to small (it shows the order, not the scale): tokens created, tokens that ever traded, tokens still traded (both CoinGecko Research estimates for the end of 2025), coins listed on CoinGecko, and the 125 coins that hold almost all value.

Four different numbers answer "how many tokens are there". They are all correct for what they count.

We do not count tokens ourselves. The chart uses a public Dune query by the Dune user @cgrogan, "Number of unique crypto tokens over time". Dune is a platform that lets anyone run queries on blockchain data. We read the monthly result on 22 October 2026 and store it on the page.

The query counts differently per chain. On Solana it counts each new token that is created. On Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Tron and Blast it counts each contract the first time it shows a standard token transfer. A token is counted once, on the chain where it first appeared. The same project on two chains can therefore be counted twice, once per chain.

Most of the growth is on two chains. Solana accounts for about 58 percent of all tokens counted and Base for about 27 percent, followed by BNB Chain at about 11 percent. All other chains together are under 5 percent.

The count was about 12.5 million at the end of 2023, about 26 million at the end of 2024 and about 62 million at the end of 2025. CoinGecko's research ties the recent surge to low-effort memecoins launched through launchpad apps such as pump.fun, where a token can be created in minutes. Many of those tokens never trade or die quickly.

Under "How many are still alive?" the page asks a simple question: if you have $100 and want $1,000,000, are the odds better in a casino or with a memecoin? Either way you need a 10,000x.

Casino: with the best possible play (European roulette, all in on one number until you reach the target) the odds are about 1 in 10,900. All in on red or black is about 1 in 14,500. No strategy can beat 1 in 10,000, because in a game where the house has an edge your expected money never grows; many small bets are the worst approach, since the edge eats them. We computed these odds exactly.

Memecoins: we took the all-time high of 3,380 pump.fun coins on CoinGecko and counted how many ever reached a market cap of about $40M, roughly 10,000 times the starting value of a new pump.fun token. That is 134 to 210 coins, out of about 22 million pump.fun launches (a public Dune query for the last 365 days plus earlier press figures). So a random launch has about a 1 in 105,000 to 1 in 165,000 chance of ever getting there, 10 to 15 times rarer than the best casino play. Reaching $1 billion is about 1 in 4.4 to 7.3 million.

Read it right: the memecoin count is tokens that ever reached the level, so you would have had to buy in the first seconds and sell at the top. CoinGecko only tracks a coin from its listing, so a few early peaks are missed, and the launch total is an estimate. It is general information about how rare these outcomes are, not a tip to gamble or to buy any token.

Read the count as activity, not as quality or value.

A made-up example: you hear that "there are over 90 million altcoins" and wonder what that means. Open Token Count, switch to the monthly view and see that millions of tokens were created each month in 2026. Then look at the table: the exchange-listed count is only a few thousand. The gap tells you that most tokens are never listed anywhere, and that listing is a filter, not the whole market. It does not tell you which token to buy.

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