2025 was presupposed to be crypto’s maturation yr, with regulatory readability, institutional adoption, and infrastructure constructed to final. In actual fact, the inspiration for all these matters was laid down.
But, it additionally delivered a grasp class in how rapidly narratives collapse when opacity meets worth 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 unhealthy 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 resolution, backed by slick advertising and marketing and distinguished trade listings.
By mid-2025, the venture had develop into a case examine in how opaque token offers destroy credibility quicker than any technical failure.
Reviews that Motion handed roughly 66 million MOVE tokens, roughly 5% of the overall provide, then value $38 million, to a market maker linked to Web3Port by an middleman.
Most of these tokens hit the market instantly. Coinbase delisted MOVE because the scandal unfolded, and the inspiration suspended after which terminated co-founder Rushi Manche whereas commissioning an exterior governance overview.
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 may profit customers.
But, DeFiLlama now exhibits 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 the majority on-chain quantity was pushed by incentives reasonably than natural development.
Leaked documentation later confirmed that no less than 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 boundaries of mercenary TVL when mixed with opaque investor preparations.
As of Dec. 30, BERA is down 93% from its launch worth.
Market Cap $86.91M
24h Quantity $13.69M
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 good points by 2024 to early 2025. The token left $0.05 and reached $9.17 in a single yr.
Market Cap $80.84M
24h Quantity $12.83M
All-Time Excessive $9.03
Whereas most altcoins had been experiencing tough worth motion in that interval, OM soared till a brutal reversal occurred.
An enormous sell-off drove the OM worth down by 90%, with Mantra blaming centralized exchanges for manipulating order books as giant derivatives positions had 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 exhibits 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 exhibits that the sector’s share of investor curiosity fell from 3.7% in 2024 to only 1.3% in 2025, dropping it completely out of the highest 20 hottest narratives and signaling a elementary lack of confidence past easy worth 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 fast declines as consumer retention stayed low and emissions outpaced demand.
Prime Gaming Crypto Property by Market Cap
GameFi’s 75% decline in 2025 represented an entire reversal from its average good points in prior years, making it one in all solely two narratives, alongside DePIN, to submit losses exceeding 70%.
The sector’s collapse stands in sharp distinction to institutional narratives.
A coin mined by telephones
Pi Community’s Open Mainnet launch on Feb. 20 triggered sharp worth actions, as early enthusiasm gave approach to a swift sell-off.
The venture, 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 achieve a file 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 dropping over 80% of its worth since its Feb. 26 peak. By late Might, after a quick rally pushed PI above $1.50, the worth had slipped round 50% from that degree.
The collapse prompted organized group backlash. Annoyed customers threatened coordinated one-star critiques on the Pi Community app and a social media marketing campaign underneath 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 underneath the core workforce’s management.
Regardless of the workforce’s makes an attempt to revive engagement, reminiscent of launching Pi Community Ventures with a $100 million fund in Might 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 worth 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 underneath $10 to $70 two days after his inauguration, briefly hitting a completely 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 $989.07M
24h Quantity $117.69M
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 identical 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 worth 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 availability dumped into that transfer, crashing the worth 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 superstar 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 submit on X, turning social clout into tradable property. Rapidly, LAUNCHCOIN’s market cap surged from almost nothing to greater than $250 million inside days in the course of the Might 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.
Reviews 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 legislation 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 examine
After hovering in late 2024, AI was presupposed to be the secular development 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 well-liked crypto narrative in 2025.
The hole between recognition and efficiency was stark, however the sector’s losses went far deeper than CoinGecko’s narrative averages prompt.
Information compiled by Crypto Presales exhibits 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 unstable 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 consumer traction to justify valuations.
Prime AI Crypto Property by Market Cap
The sector found that being adjoining to the most popular narrative in tech does not generate token worth when the blockchain layer provides friction reasonably than fixing issues.
The L2 energy legislation
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 many of the ecosystem truly misplaced floor.
DefiLlama knowledge exhibits Base holding roughly $4.5 billion in DeFi TVL and Arbitrum round $2.9 billion, whereas an extended tail of newer rollups, together with Katana, Mantle, OP Mainnet, Linea, Starknet, Scroll, and Plume, sat underneath $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 one in all crypto’s largest treasuries.
Solely Base, Katana, Ink, Starknet, Scroll, and Plume managed to register TVL development in 2025, and several other of these good points got here from aggressive, unsustainable incentive applications that briefly inflated numbers earlier than fading.
The sample uncovered a elementary downside: the market lacks adequate liquidity or real use circumstances to help dozens of competing L2s.
Incentive applications quickly pushed some chains greater, however TVL evaporated as soon as factors and airdrops ended, revealing that the majority exercise was mercenary capital looking yields reasonably 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 had 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 dropping the battle as capital rotated towards chains with both community results, institutional backing, or real product-market match.
Prime Layer 2 Crypto Property by Market Cap
The handfuls of incentive-driven L2s that hemorrhaged TVL all through 2025 proved that launching a rollup is straightforward, however getting folks to remain is the onerous half.
Bitcoin treasury wager goes fallacious
KindlyMD merged with David Bailey’s Nakamoto Holdings to develop into 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 worth to a peak of $25.03. Nonetheless, the shares traded at $0.37 as of press time, down by almost 99% because the all-time excessive.
The shares shed over 50% in a single day after PIPE shares had 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 steadiness 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 threat for buying and selling beneath $1.
NAKA grew to become the poster little one for insider unlocks, aggressive leverage, and fairness holders discovering that BTC on the steadiness 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 worth them truthfully.
The market punished initiatives that conflated advertising and marketing with product-market match and founders who handled token launches as liquidity occasions reasonably than multi-year commitments.