2025 Token Launches Struggle as Most Trade Below TGE Prices

The crypto market's 2025 debutantes are stumbling out of the gate. Forget moon shots—most freshly minted tokens can't even hold their initial launch value.

The Post-TGE Plunge

It's a brutal reality check for projects that launched with fanfare. Instead of the promised parabolic rallies, charts are painting a different picture: a steady descent below the token generation event price. The hype cycle is compressing, and investor patience is wearing thin.

Market Mechanics vs. Marketing Dreams

Teams built narratives on sand. Without sustainable tokenomics or immediate utility, these assets have nothing to counter sell-pressure from early backers and airdrop hunters looking for a quick exit. It's the financial equivalent of a product launching to immediate clearance sales.

A Filter for Fundamentals

This isn't necessarily doom—it's a filter. The downturn separates projects with long-term roadmaps from those that are just glorified fundraising rounds. Smart money is watching which teams build through the silence.

The trend exposes a cynical truth in crypto finance: a token launch is often just a liquidity event for insiders, leaving retail to guess which ones might eventually be worth more than the paper their whitepaper is printed on. The real launch happens months later, if at all.

A year of underwhelming launches

According to analysis shared by Ash from Memento Research, 2025 TGEs have been, in his words, a “bloodbath.” Out of 118 token launches tracked this year, 100 tokens, or 84.7%, are now trading below their TGE valuation. In practical terms, roughly four out of every five launches have failed to hold their opening price.

The median tells the real story, and it isn’t pretty. Across the shared document in an X post by Wu Blockchain, median FDV is down 71% from TGE, while median market cap has fallen 67%. Just 18 tokens, roughly 15% of launches, are still trading above their opening valuation.

What the data covers and what it doesn’t

The dataset focuses on larger projects with confirmed centralized exchange listings, rather than obscure or illiquid launches. TGE prices reflect a mix of DEX and CEX opening prices, with a possible ±10% variance due to data availability. Sources include on-chain data, CoinGecko, and CoinMarketCap.

In other words, this is not a cherry-picked list of failed experiments. It reflects what happened to many of the year’s most visible and well-funded launches.

ASTEN cuts through the wreckage

One token did not get buried in the carnage. ASTEN, tied to the Aster ecosystem, stands out as the strongest launch tracked by Memento Research in 2025.

Its numbers explain why. ASTEN now carries an FDV NEAR $5.7 billion, with about $300 million in daily trading volume. Since TGE, its FDV is up roughly 744.6%, an extreme outlier in a year where most charts never recovered.

What is actually driving the numbers

ASTEN’s performance has coincided with continued product development. Earlier this week, Aster announced the launch of “Shield Mode” on its decentralized perpetuals platform. The feature introduces a protected trading environment that allows up to 1001x leverage on BTC and ethereum (ETH), zero slippage, no gas fees, and concealed trade intent by avoiding public order books.

While extreme leverage is not for everyone, the release reinforced ASTEN’s positioning as an active, evolving trading venue rather than a static token story. In today’s market, liquidity is selective and valuations don’t get a free pass. Most new tokens are failing to live up to their launch prices, while a few winners stand alone as rare exceptions.

For investors, 2025 has delivered a blunt lesson: buying at TGE is no longer an easy path to upside. It now requires real traction, sustained demand, and patience in a market that has little mercy left.

Also read: Lighter’s 250M LIT Token Transfer Sparks Airdrop Speculation