What the Numbers Show
A new look at 118 crypto token launches in 2025 tells a pretty harsh story. Most of those tokens have lost money since they first hit the market.
The data tracks what is called the token generation event, or TGE - that is the moment a new crypto token becomes available for trading.
Roughly 65% of the launches have dropped 50% or more from their TGE price. And 51% of those have fallen 70% or more.
On the flip side, only 18 tokens - about 15.3% - are still in the green. Those winners have gained a median of 109.7%. But the losers fell much harder: a median loss of 76.8%. That imbalance means the average investor who bought at launch has likely taken a big hit.
Why This Happened
The report groups the tokens by category, and the picture varies depending on what kind of project you are looking at.
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Infrastructure tokens - the ones that power blockchain networks - made up the biggest batch with 46 launches. Their median fully diluted valuation dropped 72%. Artificial intelligence tokens, which had 23 launches, fared even worse with a median drop of 82%. That makes sense: AI and infrastructure were two of the most hyped areas in crypto last year, and hype often leads to inflated prices at launch.
DeFi tokens - short for decentralized finance, which are apps that handle lending and trading without a bank - did a little better. Of the 19 DeFi launches, the median drop was 52%, and 32% of them are still above their launch price. That is a higher success rate than most other categories.
Gaming tokens (6 launches) and consumer tokens (14 launches) both struggled, though the data set is smaller there. Perpetual DEX tokens - exchanges that let you trade with leverage - had a wild range: the average gain was +213%, but the median was -31%, meaning a few big winners pulled up the average.
What It Means for Investors
The real story might be about size. The report splits the launches into groups by how big their fully diluted valuation was at the start.
Tokens that launched with a valuation between $25 million and $200 million had a median drop of only 26%, and 40% of them are still green. That is pretty good compared to the rest. As the starting valuations got bigger, the outcomes got worse.
For launches between $500 million and $940 million, the median drop was 82%, and only 3% stayed positive. The median loss there was roughly 82%.
The bottom line: Buying tokens right at launch has generally been a poor bet in 2025 - especially for the high-profile, big-money projects. The smaller, more modest launches had a much better chance of holding their value. That pattern suggests the market is forcing a reality check on valuations, shaking out the projects that were priced too high from the start.
For anyone watching crypto, it is a reminder that what something opens at is not what it is worth. The numbers did the talking this year, and they were not kind to the launches that tried to start at the top.
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