2025 was purported to be crypto’s maturation yr, with regulatory readability, institutional adoption, and infrastructure constructed to final. In actual fact, the muse for all these matters was laid down.
But, it additionally delivered a grasp class in how rapidly narratives collapse when opacity meets value discovery.
Tokens that launched with most hype, extracted most charges, after which revealed the facet offers, dilution schedules, and empty guarantees that had been there all alongside.
What hyperlinks Motion’s market-maker scandal to KindlyMD’s 99% fairness drawdown is not dangerous luck or bear-market timing. It is the identical playbook: promote the dream to retail, negotiate totally different phrases with insiders, and let liquidity evaporate as soon as the music stops.
When governance theater turns into against the law scene
In December 2024, Motion Labs promised a Transfer-VM-powered Ethereum scaling answer, backed by slick advertising and marketing and distinguished change listings.
By mid-2025, the mission had turn out to be a case examine in how opaque token offers destroy credibility quicker than any technical failure.
Experiences that Motion handed roughly 66 million MOVE tokens, roughly 5% of the full provide, then value $38 million, to a market maker linked to Web3Port by way of an middleman.
Most of these tokens hit the market instantly. Coinbase delisted MOVE because the scandal unfolded, and the muse suspended after which terminated co-founder Rushi Manche whereas commissioning an exterior governance evaluate.
As of Dec. 30, MOVE is down by 97% from its December 2024 all-time excessive.
When mercenary capital meets opaque phrases
Berachain entered 2025 because the market’s favourite “native DeFi L1,” with whole worth locked (TVL) surging above $3.2 billion shortly after launch.
The blockchain proposed a “proof of liquidity” mechanism to incentivize vaults on DeFi protocols that will profit customers.
But, DeFiLlama now reveals the TVL at roughly $177 million, a drawdown exceeding 90%.
The token adopted the identical trajectory. Early airdrop recipients and yield farmers exited as heavy emissions revealed that almost all on-chain quantity was pushed by incentives moderately than natural progress.
Leaked documentation later confirmed that at the least one early investor had side-letter phrases that differed from these within the public spherical, together with extra favorable liquidity and vesting phrases.
The 2-tier deal contradicted the chain’s “group first” messaging and accelerated the token’s decline. Berachain proved the bounds of mercenary TVL when mixed with opaque investor preparations.
As of Dec. 30, BERA is down 93% from its launch value.
Market Cap $84.25M
24h Quantity $14.35M
All-Time Excessive $15.01
Worth manipulation considerations
Mantra rode the RWA narrative as a “regulated, Dubai-anchored RWA chain,” with its OM token delivering multi-hundred-percent beneficial properties by way of 2024 to early 2025. The token left $0.05 and reached $9.17 in a single yr.
Market Cap $80.05M
24h Quantity $15.31M
All-Time Excessive $9.03
Whereas most altcoins have been experiencing tough value motion in that interval, OM soared till a brutal reversal occurred.
An enormous sell-off drove the OM value down by 90%, with Mantra blaming centralized exchanges for manipulating order books as massive derivatives positions have been liquidated on these venues.
Moreover, crypto business figures stated that Mantra and market makers allegedly exploited validation gaps to inflate OM token liquidity.
OM reveals a 98% year-to-date drawdown as of Dec. 30.
GameFi by no means arrived
GameFi emerged because the second-worst-performing crypto narrative of 2025, down 75.1% year-to-date, inserting it simply forward of DePIN’s 76.7% collapse in CoinGecko’s narrative profitability rankings.
The identical knowledge reveals that the sector’s share of investor curiosity fell from 3.7% in 2024 to only 1.3% in 2025, dropping it totally out of the highest 20 hottest narratives and signaling a elementary lack of confidence past easy value motion.
The sample was constant throughout each legacy titles and new launches. Established names like AXS, GALA, and SAND stay deeply underwater from prior cycle highs, whereas the 2025 cohort struggled to interrupt out past speculative farming.
In the meantime, dApp and chain analytics confirmed transient token spikes on launch, adopted by speedy declines as person retention stayed low and emissions outpaced demand.
Prime Gaming Crypto Belongings by Market Cap
GameFi’s 75% decline in 2025 represented a whole reversal from its reasonable beneficial properties in prior years, making it certainly one of solely two narratives, alongside DePIN, to publish losses exceeding 70%.
The sector’s collapse stands in sharp distinction to institutional narratives.
A coin mined by way of telephones
Pi Community’s Open Mainnet launch on Feb. 20 triggered sharp value actions, as early enthusiasm gave technique to a swift sell-off.
The mission, which spent years as a “free to mine in your telephone” experiment, lastly transitioned from a closed beta system to an open blockchain.
The token briefly surged almost 200% over per week to succeed in a document excessive of $2.98 in late February, however the rally did not final.
By early April, the Pi token had plunged to its lowest degree since launch, buying and selling close to $0.50 and shedding over 80% of its worth since its Feb. 26 peak. By late Could, after a quick rally pushed PI above $1.50, the value had slipped round 50% from that degree.
The collapse prompted organized group backlash. Annoyed customers threatened coordinated one-star evaluations on the Pi Community app and a social media marketing campaign below the hashtag #PiNetworkProtest.
Analysts attributed the decline to ongoing token unlocks, with almost 120 million PI tokens value an estimated $62 million anticipated to enter circulation in April alone.
Considerations over token distribution intensified as roughly 60% of the PI remained below the core crew’s management.
Regardless of the crew’s makes an attempt to revive engagement, similar to launching Pi Community Ventures with a $100 million fund in Could and pivoting to gaming with the launch of FruityPi, the market had already reached its verdict.
Pi demonstrated how long-running “virtually there” initiatives collapse the second value discovery meets unlock schedules and retail holders uncover the hole between advertising and marketing and actuality.
The PolitiFi scandal
President Donald Trump-inspired TRUMP memecoin set the tone, skyrocketing from below $10 to $70 two days after his inauguration, briefly hitting a totally diluted market worth above $10 billion.
Inside weeks, the token had dropped roughly 70%, and TRUMP is down almost 90% from its peak as of Dec. 30.
Market Cap $961.4M
24h Quantity $160.59M
All-Time Excessive $17.56
Estimates confirmed that the launch generated as much as $100 million in buying and selling charges for entities tied to Trump’s enterprise ventures, whereas lots of of 1000’s of small holders misplaced cash.
Melania-inspired MELANIA memecoin adopted hours later with an analogous script. The token boomed inside just a few hours, then sharply collapsed. As of Dec. 30, MELANIA is down by over 98%.
Courtroom filings reported by Fortune alleged the token was a part of a broader scheme involving a number of fraudulent cash.
LIBRA in Argentina accomplished the trilogy.
After President Javier Milei boosted the Solana token on social media, its value exploded from microscopic ranges to round $5, briefly giving it a market cap close to $4.6 billion.
Nonetheless, founders controlling roughly 70% of the provision dumped into that transfer, crashing the value by roughly 85% inside hours. Argentine prosecutors opened fraud and corruption probes.
IPOs at tweet pace, rugs at market pace
Launch Coin on Consider was initially the celeb token PASTERNAK, created by Ben Pasternak, and have become the flagship for “Web Capital Markets” (ICM) on Solana.
The idea was easy: mint a token by replying to a Launch Coin publish on X, turning social clout into tradable property. Shortly, LAUNCHCOIN’s market cap surged from almost nothing to greater than $250 million inside days in the course of the Could ICM mania.
By late 2025, the flagship token had been rebranded to BELIEVE and was buying and selling round $0.007, with a market cap of almost $9.5 million.
Experiences described pump-and-dump cycles throughout the platform’s ecosystem tokens. YAPPER, a featured ICM token, dropped greater than 75% from its peak.
The October rebrand from LAUNCHCOIN to BELIEVE included a provide enhance from 1 billion to 1.33 billion tokens.
CoinGecko famous {that a} US regulation agency is now organizing potential authorized motion towards Consider and Pasternak on behalf of aggrieved token-holders.
ICM promised startup IPOs at tweet pace however delivered a conveyor belt of thin-liquidity rugs.
AI tokens meet a actuality verify
After hovering in late 2024, AI was purported to be the secular progress story of this cycle.
Nonetheless, a CoinGecko narrative recap confirmed that AI tokens posted common year-to-date returns of -50.2%, regardless of AI remaining the second-most fashionable crypto narrative in 2025.
The hole between reputation and efficiency was stark, however the sector’s losses went far deeper than CoinGecko’s narrative averages instructed.
Information compiled by Crypto Presales reveals AI tokens misplaced roughly 75% of their mixed worth yr over yr, wiping out an estimated $53 billion from the market.
The sell-off intensified towards year-end, with December alone accounting for almost $10 billion in losses, capping a risky interval wherein sentiment deteriorated simply weeks earlier than year-end.
November had already shed roughly $4 billion, making the fourth quarter a massacre for the sector.
The harm was concentrated among the many sector’s supposed leaders.
Eight of the ten largest AI and massive knowledge tokens by market capitalization posted losses exceeding 70% over the previous yr. Synthetic Superintelligence Alliance fell 84%, whereas Render and The Graph every dropped 82%.
FET’s market cap stood at $482.96 million by late December, with the token buying and selling at $0.21, down 62.73% over 90 days.
Even Virtuals Protocol, 2024’s standout performer that surged greater than 3,500%, has given again almost 87% since its peak, alongside sharp declines in Injective, Filecoin, Web Laptop, and NEAR Protocol.
The sample was constant: tokens that rode narrative momentum in 2024 spent 2025 bleeding because it grew to become clear that “AI plus blockchain” meant little with out paying customers or defensible moats.
Whereas OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google poured billions into compute and mannequin coaching, on-chain AI tokens priced future utility years too early with out the income or person traction to justify valuations.
Prime AI Crypto Belongings by Market Cap
The sector found that being adjoining to the most popular narrative in tech would not generate token worth when the blockchain layer provides friction moderately than fixing issues.
The L2 energy regulation
On-chain exercise and TVL continued emigrate to L2s in 2025, however the spoils did not simply cluster on the high. As a substitute, they concentrated so closely that a lot of the ecosystem truly misplaced floor.
DefiLlama knowledge reveals Base holding roughly $4.5 billion in DeFi TVL and Arbitrum round $2.9 billion, whereas a protracted tail of newer rollups, together with Katana, Mantle, OP Mainnet, Linea, Starknet, Scroll, and Plume, sat below $500 million every.
What’s worse: the vast majority of these L2s did not simply fail to develop, they actively shed liquidity all year long.
OP Mainnet noticed TVL collapse by 64%, Linea misplaced roughly half its deposits, and Mantle bled 23.5% of its worth regardless of being backed by certainly one of crypto’s largest treasuries.
Solely Base, Katana, Ink, Starknet, Scroll, and Plume managed to register TVL progress in 2025, and a number of other of these beneficial properties got here from aggressive, unsustainable incentive applications that briefly inflated numbers earlier than fading.
The sample uncovered a elementary downside: the market lacks ample liquidity or real use circumstances to assist dozens of competing L2s.
Incentive applications quickly pushed some chains greater, however TVL evaporated as soon as factors and airdrops ended, revealing that almost all exercise was mercenary capital searching yields moderately than customers selecting platforms for utility or developer expertise.
On the token degree, L2 governance tokens posted common returns of -40.6% for 2025, marking a second consecutive unprofitable yr, in accordance with CoinGecko.
A number of smaller rollups have been decommissioned or consolidated. Kroma introduced a wind-down and urged customers to bridge again to the Ethereum mainnet, tacitly admitting what the TVL numbers already confirmed: being “simply one other L2” is not a viable enterprise mannequin.
The narrative of “infinite rollups” bumped into power-law actuality. Base captured structural liquidity by providing Coinbase’s distribution and a consumer-friendly developer expertise.
Arbitrum held onto its early-mover benefit and deep DeFi integrations. Everybody else fought over scraps, with most shedding the battle as capital rotated towards chains with both community results, institutional backing, or real product-market match.
Prime Layer 2 Crypto Belongings by Market Cap
The handfuls of incentive-driven L2s that hemorrhaged TVL all through 2025 proved that launching a rollup is simple, however getting individuals to remain is the laborious half.
Bitcoin treasury guess goes incorrect
KindlyMD merged with David Bailey’s Nakamoto Holdings to turn out to be a Bitcoin-treasury-plus-healthcare hybrid and have become the cleanest instance of how badly the digital asset treasury commerce went.
The announcement prompted the NAKA inventory value to a peak of $25.03. Nonetheless, the shares traded at $0.37 as of press time, down by almost 99% for the reason that all-time excessive.
The shares shed over 50% in a single day after PIPE shares have been unlocked, permitting early traders to promote into the market.
Unchained highlighted that the merger and PIPE financing massively expanded the share depend, with SEC filings displaying excellent shares leaping from about 6 million to over 112 million across the deal.
KindlyMD nonetheless holds 5,398 BTC on its stability sheet, in accordance with Bitcoin Treasuries, making it a top-20 public Bitcoin holder. But, the fairness trades at a steep low cost to its Bitcoin stash and faces Nasdaq delisting danger for buying and selling beneath $1.
NAKA grew to become the poster youngster for insider unlocks, aggressive leverage, and fairness holders discovering that BTC on the stability sheet doesn’t assure fairness returns.
The sample throughout 2025’s greatest losers was constant: opacity, extreme dilution, mercenary capital, and narratives that collapsed the second retail might value them actually.
The market punished initiatives that conflated advertising and marketing with product-market match and founders who handled token launches as liquidity occasions moderately than multi-year commitments.
