The 10 biggest crypto losers of 2025 (and what went wrong)
2025 was presupposed to be crypto’s maturation yr, with regulatory readability, institutional adoption, and infrastructure constructed to final. In reality, the inspiration for all these matters was laid down.
Yet, 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 aspect offers, dilution schedules, and empty guarantees that had been there all alongside.
What hyperlinks Movement’s market-maker scandal to KindlyMD’s 99% fairness drawdown is not dangerous luck or bear-market timing. It’s 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 a criminal offense scene
In December 2024, Movement Labs promised a Move-VM-powered Ethereum scaling resolution, backed by slick advertising and marketing and outstanding alternate listings.
By mid-2025, the challenge had change into a case examine in how opaque token offers destroy credibility sooner than any technical failure.
Reports that Movement handed roughly 66 million MOVE tokens, roughly 5% of the entire provide, then value $38 million, to a market maker linked to Web3Port via 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 high.
When mercenary capital meets opaque phrases
Berachain entered 2025 because the market’s favourite “native DeFi L1,” with complete 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.
Yet, 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 the majority on-chain quantity was pushed by incentives slightly than natural development.
Leaked documentation later showed 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 two-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.
Price manipulation considerations
Mantra rode the RWA narrative as a “regulated, Dubai-anchored RWA chain,” with its OM token delivering multi-hundred-percent positive factors via 2024 to early 2025. The token left $0.05 and reached $9.17 in a single yr.
While most altcoins have been experiencing tough value motion in that interval, OM soared till a brutal reversal occurred.
A large 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.
Additionally, crypto business figures mentioned 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 similar information reveals that the sector’s share of investor curiosity fell from 3.7% in 2024 to simply 1.3% in 2025, dropping it completely out of the highest 20 hottest narratives and signaling a basic loss 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.
Meanwhile, dApp and chain analytics confirmed transient token spikes on launch, adopted by fast declines as consumer retention stayed low and emissions outpaced demand.
Top Gaming Crypto Assets by Market Cap
GameFi’s 75% decline in 2025 represented an entire reversal from its average positive factors in prior years, making it 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 via telephones
Pi Network’s Open Mainnet launch on Feb. 20 triggered sharp value actions, as early enthusiasm gave approach to a swift sell-off.
The challenge, 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 nearly 200% over a week to achieve a report high of $2.98 in late February, however the rally did not final.
By early April, the Pi token had plunged to its lowest level since launch, buying and selling close to $0.50 and shedding over 80% of its worth since its Feb. 26 peak. By late May, after a short rally pushed PI above $1.50, the worth had slipped round 50% from that degree.
The collapse prompted organized group backlash. Frustrated customers threatened coordinated one-star opinions on the Pi Network app and a social media marketing campaign below the hashtag #PiNetworkProtest.
Analysts attributed the decline to ongoing token unlocks, with practically 120 million PI tokens value an estimated $62 million expected to enter circulation in April alone.
Concerns over token distribution intensified as roughly 60% of the PI remained below the core group’s management.
Despite the group’s makes an attempt to revive engagement, similar to launching Pi Network Ventures with a $100 million fund in May and pivoting to gaming with the launch of FruityPi, the market had already reached its verdict.
Pi demonstrated how long-running “nearly 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.
Within weeks, the token had dropped roughly 70%, and TRUMP is down practically 90% from its peak as of Dec. 30.
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 tons of of 1000’s of small holders misplaced cash.
Melania-inspired MELANIA memecoin adopted hours later with the same script. The token boomed inside a number of hours, then sharply collapsed. As of Dec. 30, MELANIA is down by over 98%.
Court filings reported by Fortune alleged the token was half 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.
However, founders controlling roughly 70% of the availability dumped into that transfer, crashing the worth by roughly 85% within hours. Argentine prosecutors opened fraud and corruption probes.
IPOs at tweet pace, rugs at market pace
Launch Coin on Believe was initially the celeb token PASTERNAK, created by Ben Pasternak, and have become the flagship for “Internet 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. Quickly, LAUNCHCOIN’s market cap surged from practically nothing to greater than $250 million inside days throughout the May 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 practically $9.5 million.
Reports 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 Believe 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 soaring in late 2024, AI was presupposed to be the secular development story of this cycle.
However, a CoinGecko narrative recap confirmed that AI tokens posted common year-to-date returns of -50.2%, regardless of AI remaining the second-most standard 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 steered.
Data 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 practically $10 billion in losses, capping a unstable interval during which 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 information tokens by market capitalization posted losses exceeding 70% over the previous yr. Artificial 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 practically 87% since its peak, alongside sharp declines in Injective, Filecoin, Internet Computer, 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.
While 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.
Top AI Crypto Assets 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 slightly 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. Instead, they concentrated so closely that the majority of the ecosystem really misplaced floor.
DefiLlama information reveals 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 below $500 million every.
What’s worse: the bulk 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 of crypto’s largest treasuries.
Only Base, Katana, Ink, Starknet, Scroll, and Plume managed to register TVL development in 2025, and a number of other of these positive factors got here from aggressive, unsustainable incentive packages that briefly inflated numbers earlier than fading.
The sample uncovered a basic drawback: the market lacks sufficient liquidity or genuine use cases to assist dozens of competing L2s.
Incentive packages briefly pushed some chains larger, however TVL evaporated as soon as factors and airdrops ended, revealing that the majority exercise was mercenary capital looking yields slightly than customers selecting platforms for utility or developer expertise.
At the token degree, L2 governance tokens posted common returns of -40.6% for 2025, marking a second consecutive unprofitable yr, based on CoinGecko.
Several 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. Everyone 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.
Top Layer 2 Crypto Assets by Market Cap
The dozens of incentive-driven L2s that hemorrhaged TVL all through 2025 proved that launching a rollup is straightforward, however getting individuals to remain is the laborious half.
Bitcoin treasury wager goes flawed
KindlyMD merged with David Bailey’s Nakamoto Holdings to change 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 value to a peak of $25.03. However, the shares traded at $0.37 as of press time, down by practically 99% because the all-time high.
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 rely, 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, based on Bitcoin Treasuries, making it a top-20 public Bitcoin holder. Yet, the fairness trades at a steep low cost to its Bitcoin stash and faces Nasdaq delisting danger for buying and selling under $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 biggest losers was constant: opacity, extreme dilution, mercenary capital, and narratives that collapsed the second retail may 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 slightly than multi-year commitments.
The publish The 10 biggest crypto losers of 2025 (and what went wrong) appeared first on CryptoSlate.
