The Year of the Demise of New Tokens

Author: Shaunda Devens Source: blockworks Translation: Shan Ouba, Jinse Finance

In 2025, new token valuations experienced significant compression, with the infrastructure and gaming sectors seeing the steepest declines.

As the year draws to a close, this article will review the actual flow of capital throughout the year. First, index data shows that funds continued to shift towards large-scale, market-proven crypto infrastructure, while speculative sectors continued to decline. We will then quantify the losses of newly issued tokens in 2025.

Index Performance

Over the past week, Bitcoin was essentially flat (up 0.3%), lagging behind traditional benchmark indices—the Nasdaq (up 1.7%), gold (up 1.1%), and the S&P 500 (up 0.9%).

Index Performance

In the past week, Bitcoin was essentially flat (up 0.3%), underperforming traditional benchmark indices—the Nasdaq (up 1.7%), gold (up 1.1%), and the S&P 500 (up 0.9%).

Around December 18th, this divergence intensified: most crypto sectors experienced significant sell-offs, while the stock market remained stable. This suggests that the decline was a risk-averse behavior specific to the crypto industry, rather than a result of a broader weakening of the macroeconomy. The decentralized exchange (DEX) sector (up 11%) led all indices, followed by crypto mining companies (up 9.5%) and 2025 crypto concept stocks (up 9.2%). The strong performance of decentralized exchanges was primarily driven by UNI, whose price rose 15.4% after the UNI on-chain unified proposal vote passed, with 69 million UNI (reaching the required 40 million fiat votes) casting their votes in favor. The public chain (L1) sector (down 2%) and the exchange token sector (down 2.2%) saw slight losses. The artificial intelligence sector performed the worst (down 21%), mainly dragged down by TAO (down 21%). TAO's weakness may stem from two factors: first, the "sell the news" sell-off following Bittensor's first halving (around December 14th) – this halving reduced the daily supply by half, but did not immediately translate into increased demand; second, the general risk aversion sentiment across the entire AI token sector. The Negative Return Dilemma of New Tokens With the year-end approaching, it's worth paying close attention to the worst market performance of 2025: newly issued tokens. A recent post by Ahboyash uses concrete data to confirm many people's intuitive feelings. Of the 117 tokens issued in 2025, the vast majority had negative returns. The median token price fell by approximately 71% from its fully diluted valuation (FDV) at listing. Only 17 out of 117 tokens (15%) traded above their initial offering price, while approximately 40% of tokens saw declines exceeding 80%. The recent price drop was widespread and severe: 100 out of 117 tokens (85%) are trading below their initial offering price. Losses are primarily concentrated in the 50%-90% price drop range, which accounts for the largest proportion of tokens affected. In extreme cases, 15 tokens have fallen by more than 90%, including highly watched projects such as Berachain (down 93%), Animecoin (down 94%), and Bio Protocol (down 93%). Overall, the total fully diluted valuation of this batch of new tokens has shrunk from $139 billion at the time of listing to $54 billion today. This means that after excluding all projects that have gone almost to zero, the "paper" fully diluted valuation has evaporated by approximately $87 billion (a drop of 59%). While tail-end performance does diverge, it's highly concentrated. The worst-performing tokens are concentrated in the infrastructure and gaming sectors, with Syndicate (down 93.6%) and Animecoin (down 93.6%) lagging behind. Meanwhile, the top performers are mostly late-stage projects launched in the second half of 2025 with lower initial valuations, including Aster (up 745%), Yooldo Games (up 538%), and Humanity (up 323%).