Before I get into the bones of my discussion today I need to freely admit something. As many academics at the same time scorn Wikipedia and then use it on the sly, hopefully just to provide an initial framing of their research, today I have taken a plunge with Co-Pilot just to see what its findings are. It is of course not the way to carry out research; other than how I have suggested in the previous sentence I decided to take the plunge and see where it lead. So, while the writing and the ordering of the data is mine, and thus not AI written, I have presented exactly what Co-Pilot has told me.

And let this be a lesson for us to ensure each of us does our own DYOR!

Co-Pilot may have come up with the right answers, but you will never know if you don't look and if you wonder why I am doing this lengthy preamble it is precisely to demonstrate that it is really me who is writing it!

So I asked Co-Pilot which Crypto Project has experienced the biggest single failure of 2026 and this is what it came up with, with my own comments added where appropriate.

The biggest single crypto project failure visible in 2026 is not one new collapse, but rather the culmination of a mass failure wave itself: over 53% of all cryptocurrencies launched since 2021 are now dead and more starkly, 86% of these failures occurred in 2025 alone. To put it another way 13.4 million of the 25.2 million projects out there failed between 2021–2025, or more than half. Within this broader collapse, the most catastrophic individual failures still shaping 2026 are the legacy implosions of Terra/LUNA, FTX, and other major platforms whose aftershocks continue to dominate the industry’s failure narrative.

Most of these failures have happened quietly through delistings, abandoned GitHubs, zero liquidity, and vanished communities and together they represent the largest coordinated failure event in crypto history — even bigger in scale than the 2018 ICO wipeout.

Reasons for the collapse are myriad. Those projects that lack of visibility, those with no credible media presence have a 91% chance of failing within six months. Furthermore many projects simply die when the founders and support teams disappear once markets dipped. This lends more weight to the argument they may well be ponzis. Those projects build on speculative-only tokenomics that have no real utility collapsed when liquidity dried up and to add to in when SEC and other regulatory bodies started tightening up and demanding greater compliance many projects (and probably rightly so!) disappeared into the night. The  macro crash that we are still experiencing (2025–2026), which saw a $2T market cap wipeout was triggered by tariffs, ETF outflows, and geopolitical stress. If there is any good news with the general stablisation and bottoming out of BitCoin the worst might be over. However when taken together this combination created a perfect storm: weak projects died instantly, and mid‑tier ones suffocated from lack of liquidity.

Co-Pilot then went on to cite the most influential individual failures, whose ripple effects are still being felt today, even if the events themselves happened earlier in the decade. Still Dominating 2026.

The first example it gives is Terra/LUNA (Algorithmic Stablecoin Collapse), which destroyed $45B in value and exposed the fragility of algorithmic stablecoins. It has sadly become a prime example of “Ponzinomics” token design. Secondly, we have to look at what happened with FTX whose collapse saw the vaporisation (Co-Pilot's word) of $8B in customer funds that in itself triggered global regulatory crackdowns which are still killing projects in 2026. I suppose that it was inevitable that Co-Pilot would mention Celsius (the one that burned me) alongside BlockFi, Voyager and Genesis (Yield Platform Contagion), which all collapsed due to their ponzi‑like yield structures, unsecured lending, and counterparty failures. You may recall I recently posted on Celsius' implosion, four years on.

The point is that while these failures didn’t happen in 2026 their aftershocks are the biggest reason so many 2026 projects are dying.

So to sumarise what we have seen is the unprecedented mass extinction of projects, rather than a single collapse which was driven by visibility failures, trust breakdowns, regulatory pressure, and the 2025–2026 macro crash, all amplified by the lingering fallout from Terra and FTX.

So how did Co-Pilot do?

Please remember that while I sourced this from Co-Pilot it has esstentially been written by me and I could have produced the same result by visiting the same webpages that Co-Pilot cited. This begs the question as to whether AI such as Co-Pilot is an acceptable and more efficient way to carry out research.

That is another topic for another day my friends.

And on that note, and as always stay safe and well.