The Year of the New Token's Demise

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

In 2025, the valuation of new tokens is faced with significant compression, with the declines in the infrastructure and gaming sectors being the steepest.

As the end of the year approaches, this article will review the actual flow of capital throughout the year. First, index data shows that funds continue to shift towards large-scale, market-validated crypto infrastructure, while speculative sectors continue to pull back. Next, we will quantify the losses of newly issued tokens in 2025.

Index Performance

Over the past week, Bitcoin was basically 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 18, this divergence intensified: most of the crypto sector was heavily sold off, while the stock market remained stable. This indicates that the recent decline is a specific risk-averse behavior within the crypto industry, rather than a result of widespread macroeconomic weakening.

The decentralized exchange (DEX) sector (up 11%) leads all indices, followed closely by crypto mining companies (up 9.5%) and the 2025 crypto concept stocks sector (up 9.2%). The outstanding performance of decentralized exchanges is mainly driven by UNI, whose price increased by 15.4%—this came after the on-chain governance proposal vote for UNI passed, with 69 million UNI (reaching the 40 million required votes) cast in favor. The public chain (L1) sector (down 2%) and the exchange token sector (down 2.2%) experienced slight losses.

The artificial intelligence sector performed the worst (down 21%), primarily affected by TAO (down 21%). The weakness of TAO may stem from two aspects: first, the “buy the rumor, sell the news” type of sell-off after Bittensor's first halving event (around December 14) — this halving reduced the daily issuance by half but did not immediately translate into incremental demand; second, the general risk-averse sentiment across the entire artificial intelligence token sector.

The Dilemma of Negative Returns for New Tokens

As the end of the year approaches, it is worth paying close attention to the bleak market performance of newly issued tokens in 2025. A recent post by Ahboyash has confirmed many people's intuitive feelings with specific data. Among the 117 tokens issued in 2025, the vast majority have negative returns. The median token has fallen approximately 71% from its fully diluted valuation (FDV) at the time of listing. Only 17 out of 117 tokens (15%) have trading prices higher than their issuance valuation, and about 40% of the tokens have dropped more than 80%.

The recent decline has been widespread and severe: 100 out of 117 tokens (85%) are in a state of loss. The losses are primarily concentrated in the range of 50%-90% decline, which accounts for the largest proportion of tokens.

In extreme cases, 15 tokens fell more than 90%, including Berachain (down 93%), Animecoin (down 94%), and Bio Protocol (down 93%), among other highly watched projects.

X

Overall, the total fully diluted valuation of this batch of new tokens has shrunk from 139 billion dollars at the time of listing to 54 billion dollars today. This means that, excluding all projects that are nearly worthless, the “book” fully diluted valuation has evaporated by about 87 billion dollars (a decrease of 59%).

There is indeed a divergence in tail-end returns, but it is 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 standout winners are mostly late-stage projects issued in the second half of 2025 with initially lower valuations, including Aster (up 745%), Yooldo Games (up 538%), and Humanity (up 323%).