2025’s Token Launches: A Bloodbath with 85% Trading Below TGE Valuation

The crypto market's 2025 debutantes aren't having their moment. Instead of moon shots, most are stuck in the launchpad mud.

The Grim Reality of Post-Launch Performance

Forget the hype. The data paints a stark picture of immediate post-TGE decay for a vast majority of new entrants. It's a brutal filter separating speculative vapor from projects with real traction.

Navigating the New Token Wasteland

This isn't just bad luck—it's a market voting with its wallet. Liquidity gets pulled, attention spans shorten, and only the strongest narratives find oxygen. It's Darwinism for digital assets, playing out in real-time on the charts.

The trend forces a hard look at launch mechanics themselves. Are valuations justified, or just a fancy spreadsheet trick to please early VCs? Sometimes, the most innovative thing about a new token is its creative accounting. The message for builders is clear: deliver utility, not just a tokenomics paper.

For investors, it's a call for extreme selectivity. The easy money from indiscriminate launches is gone. Now, it's about spotting resilience in a sea of red—finding the few projects actually building while the rest are busy printing merch.

How did the tokens launched in 2025 do?

The data paints a grim picture of the 2025 token launch space, which was previously known to see price appreciation immediately after TGEs.

Venture capital firms usually invest in these projects at valuations that can be 10, 100, or even 1,000 times cheaper than what retail investors pay when tokens become publicly available.

By the time ordinary investors gain access at the token generation event, insiders have already secured their positions at way lower prices.

Venture funding in the first quarter of 2025 alone reached $4.8 billion, and in Q3, crypto startups and projects pulled $4.59 billion in funding, with much of that capital flowing to late-stage companies.

Meanwhile, retail investors face an increasingly difficult environment, buying tokens at inflated, fully diluted valuations that leave little room for appreciation.

Could the fall be as a result of market conditions?

Periodic sell-offs and sharp price adjustments in major digital assets like Bitcoin and Ether have also contributed to risk aversion among investors.

Both leading assets have fallen from the respective highs they hit this year. The alt season that usually accompanies the rise of bitcoin didn’t occur as expected. When it looked like the market was set to go parabolic, the market experienced the infamous “1011 crash,” a sudden collapse in October that has left the market in a prolonged correction phase, accompanied by a series of liquidations and downward pressure.

These crypto benchmarks have amplified the challenges faced by new token entrants, as investor capital flows toward safe-haven assets or established tokens.

Industry observers have also noted that an oversupply of token launches has diluted liquidity and fragmented investor interest. Even as niche sectors such as memecoins or specific network ecosystems generate pockets of demand, the cumulative effect of continuous new supply has hampered sustainable price momentum.

However, not all assets have performed poorly this year, as a few large-cap projects and established networks, such as Zora, Bedrock, Humanity, and Yooldo Games, have fared better, with YZI Labs-backed Aster’s token rising by over 700% from its launch price.

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