The 10 biggest crypto losers of 2025 (and what went wrong)

2025 was supposed to be crypto's maturation year, with regulatory clarity, institutional adoption, and infrastructure built to last. In fact, the foundation for all these topics was laid down.

Yet, it also delivered a master class in how quickly narratives collapse when opacity meets price discovery.

Tokens that launched with maximum hype, extracted maximum fees, and then revealed the side deals, dilution schedules, and empty promises that had been there all along.

What links Movement's market-maker scandal to KindlyMD's 99% equity drawdown isn't bad luck or bear-market timing. It's the same playbook: sell the dream to retail, negotiate different terms with insiders, and let liquidity evaporate once the music stops.

When governance theater becomes a crime scene

In December 2024, Movement Labs promised a Move-VM-powered Ethereum scaling solution, backed by slick marketing and prominent exchange listings.

By mid-2025, the project had become a case study in how opaque token deals destroy credibility faster than any technical failure.

Reports that Movement handed roughly 66 million MOVE tokens, approximately 5% of the total supply, then worth $38 million, to a market maker linked to Web3Port through an intermediary.

Most of those tokens hit the market immediately. Coinbase delisted MOVE as the scandal unfolded, and the foundation suspended and then terminated co-founder Rushi Manche while commissioning an external governance review.

As of Dec. 30, MOVE is down by 97% from its December 2024 all-time high.

MOVE token chart shows a sharp spike to over $1.20 in December 2024, followed by a sustained decline to $0.03 through 2025.

When mercenary capital meets opaque terms

Berachain entered 2025 as the market's favorite “native DeFi L1,” with total value 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 would benefit users.

Yet, DeFiLlama now shows the TVL at roughly $177 million, a drawdown exceeding 90%.

The token followed the same trajectory. Early airdrop recipients and yield farmers exited as heavy emissions revealed that most on-chain volume was driven by incentives rather than organic growth.

Leaked documentation later showed that at least one early investor had side-letter terms that differed from those in the public round, including more favorable liquidity and vesting terms.

The two-tier deal contradicted the chain's “community first” messaging and accelerated the token's decline. Berachain proved the limits of mercenary TVL when combined with opaque investor arrangements.

Berachain TVL peaked above $3.3 billion in early 2025, then collapsed over 90% to roughly $176 million by year-end.

As of Dec. 30, BERA is down 93% from its launch price.

Price manipulation concerns

Mantra rode the RWA narrative as a “regulated, Dubai-anchored RWA chain,” with its OM token delivering multi-hundred-percent gains through 2024 to early 2025. The token left $0.05 and reached $9.17 in one year.

While most altcoins were experiencing rough price action in that period, OM soared until a brutal reversal happened.

A massive sell-off drove the OM price down by 90%, with Mantra blaming centralized exchanges for manipulating order books as large derivatives positions were liquidated on those venues.

OM token surged from under $1 to nearly $9 in early 2025, then crashed over 90% to $0.07 by year-end.

Additionally, crypto industry figures said that Mantra and market makers allegedly exploited validation gaps to inflate OM token liquidity.

OM shows a 98% year-to-date drawdown as of Dec. 30.

GameFi never arrived

GameFi emerged as the second-worst-performing crypto narrative of 2025, down 75.1% year-to-date, placing it just ahead of DePIN's 76.7% collapse in CoinGecko's narrative profitability rankings.

The same data shows that the sector's share of investor interest fell from 3.7% in 2024 to just 1.3% in 2025, dropping it entirely out of the top 20 most popular narratives and signaling a fundamental loss of confidence beyond simple price action.

The pattern was consistent across both legacy titles and new launches. Established names like AXS, GALA, and SAND remain deeply underwater from prior cycle highs, while the 2025 cohort struggled to break out beyond speculative farming.

Meanwhile, dApp and chain analytics showed brief token spikes on launch, followed by rapid declines as user retention stayed low and emissions outpaced demand.

Top Gaming Crypto Assets by Market Cap

GameFi's 75% decline in 2025 represented a complete reversal from its moderate gains in prior years, making it one of only two narratives, alongside DePIN, to post losses exceeding 70%.
The sector's collapse stands in sharp contrast to institutional narratives.

CoinGecko chart shows GameFi tokens declining approximately 75% in 2025, one of the worst-performing crypto narratives of the year.

A coin mined through phones

Pi Network's Open Mainnet launch on Feb. 20 triggered sharp price movements, as early enthusiasm gave way to a swift sell-off.

The project, which spent years as a “free to mine on your phone” experiment, finally transitioned from a closed beta system to an open blockchain.

The token briefly surged nearly 200% over a week to reach a record high of $2.98 in late February, but the rally didn't last.

By early April, the Pi token had plunged to its lowest level since launch, trading near $0.50 and losing over 80% of its value since its Feb. 26 peak. By late May, after a brief rally pushed PI above $1.50, the price had slipped around 50% from that level.

The collapse prompted organized community backlash. Frustrated users threatened coordinated one-star reviews on the Pi Network app and a social media campaign under the hashtag #PiNetworkProtest.

Analysts attributed the decline to ongoing token unlocks, with nearly 120 million PI tokens worth an estimated $62 million expected to enter circulation in April alone.

Concerns over token distribution intensified as roughly 60% of the PI remained under the core team's control.

Despite the team's attempts to revive engagement, such as 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 “almost there” projects collapse the moment price discovery meets unlock schedules and retail holders discover the gap between marketing and reality.

Pi Network token spiked to nearly $2.50 in February 2025, then declined over 90% to approximately $0.20 by year-end.

The PolitiFi scandal

President Donald Trump-inspired TRUMP memecoin set the tone, skyrocketing from under $10 to $70 two days after his inauguration, briefly hitting a fully diluted market value above $10 billion.

Within weeks, the token had dropped roughly 70%, and TRUMP is down nearly 90% from its peak as of Dec. 30.

Estimates showed that the launch generated up to $100 million in trading fees for entities tied to Trump's business ventures, while hundreds of thousands of small holders lost money.

Melania-inspired MELANIA memecoin followed hours later with a similar script. The token boomed within a few hours, then sharply collapsed. As of Dec. 30, MELANIA is down by over 98%.

Court filings reported by Fortune alleged the token was part of a broader scheme involving multiple fraudulent coins.

LIBRA in Argentina completed the trilogy.

After President Javier Milei boosted the Solana token on social media, its price exploded from microscopic levels to around $5, briefly giving it a market cap near $4.6 billion.

However, founders controlling roughly 70% of the supply dumped into that move, crashing the price by approximately 85% within hours. Argentine prosecutors opened fraud and corruption probes.

TRUMP token peaked near $45 in January 2025 before declining to around $5, while MELANIA and LIBRA collapsed to near-zero.

IPOs at tweet speed, rugs at market speed

Launch Coin on Believe was originally the celebrity token PASTERNAK, created by Ben Pasternak, and became the flagship for “Internet Capital Markets” (ICM) on Solana.

The concept was simple: mint a token by replying to a Launch Coin post on X, turning social clout into tradable assets. Quickly, LAUNCHCOIN's market cap surged from nearly nothing to more than $250 million within days during the May ICM mania.

By late 2025, the flagship token had been rebranded to BELIEVE and was trading around $0.007, with a market cap of nearly $9.5 million.

Reports described pump-and-dump cycles across the platform's ecosystem tokens. YAPPER, a featured ICM token, dropped more than 75% from its peak.

The October rebrand from LAUNCHCOIN to BELIEVE included a supply increase from 1 billion to 1.33 billion tokens.

CoinGecko noted that a US law firm is now organizing potential legal action against Believe and Pasternak on behalf of aggrieved token-holders.

ICM promised startup IPOs at tweet speed but delivered a conveyor belt of thin-liquidity rugs.

BELIEVE token spiked to $250 million market cap during May 2025 ICM mania, then collapsed to under $9.3 million by year-end.

AI tokens meet a reality check

After soaring in late 2024, AI was supposed to be the secular growth story of this cycle.

However, a CoinGecko narrative recap showed that AI tokens posted average year-to-date returns of -50.2%, despite AI remaining the second-most popular crypto narrative in 2025.

The gap between popularity and performance was stark, but the sector's losses went far deeper than CoinGecko's narrative averages suggested.

Data compiled by Crypto Presales shows AI tokens lost roughly 75% of their combined value year over year, wiping out an estimated $53 billion from the market.

The sell-off intensified toward year-end, with December alone accounting for nearly $10 billion in losses, capping a volatile period in which sentiment deteriorated just weeks before year-end.

November had already shed roughly $4 billion, making the fourth quarter a bloodbath for the sector.
The damage was concentrated among the sector's supposed leaders.

Eight of the ten largest AI and big data tokens by market capitalization posted losses exceeding 70% over the past year. Artificial Superintelligence Alliance fell 84%, while Render and The Graph each dropped 82%.

FET's market cap stood at $482.96 million by late December, with the token trading at $0.21, down 62.73% over 90 days.

Even Virtuals Protocol, 2024's standout performer that surged more than 3,500%, has given back nearly 87% since its peak, alongside sharp declines in Injective, Filecoin, Internet Computer, and NEAR Protocol.

The pattern was consistent: tokens that rode narrative momentum in 2024 spent 2025 bleeding as it became clear that “AI plus blockchain” meant little without paying users or defensible moats.

While OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google poured billions into compute and model training, on-chain AI tokens priced future utility years too early without the revenue or user traction to justify valuations.

Top AI Crypto Assets by Market Cap

The sector discovered that being adjacent to the hottest narrative in tech doesn't generate token value when the blockchain layer adds friction rather than solving problems.

CoinGecko chart shows AI tokens averaging -50% returns in 2025, underperforming most crypto narratives despite high popularity and investor interest.

The L2 power law

On-chain activity and TVL continued to migrate to L2s in 2025, but the spoils didn't just cluster at the top. Instead, they concentrated so heavily that most of the ecosystem actually lost ground.

DefiLlama data shows Base holding roughly $4.5 billion in DeFi TVL and Arbitrum around $2.9 billion, while a long tail of newer rollups, including Katana, Mantle, OP Mainnet, Linea, Starknet, Scroll, and Plume, sat under $500 million each.

What's worse: the majority of these L2s didn't just fail to grow, they actively shed liquidity throughout the year.

OP Mainnet saw TVL collapse by 64%, Linea lost roughly half its deposits, and Mantle bled 23.5% of its value despite being backed by one of crypto's largest treasuries.

Only Base, Katana, Ink, Starknet, Scroll, and Plume managed to register TVL growth in 2025, and several of those gains came from aggressive, unsustainable incentive programs that briefly inflated numbers before fading.

Base leads Ethereum layer-2 DeFi with $4.5 billion TVL, followed by Arbitrum at $2.9 billion, while most competitors hold under $500 million.

The pattern exposed a fundamental problem: the market lacks sufficient liquidity or genuine use cases to support dozens of competing L2s.

Incentive programs temporarily pushed some chains higher, but TVL evaporated once points and airdrops ended, revealing that most activity was mercenary capital hunting yields rather than users choosing platforms for utility or developer experience.

At the token level, L2 governance tokens posted average returns of -40.6% for 2025, marking a second consecutive unprofitable year, according to CoinGecko.

Several smaller rollups were decommissioned or consolidated. Kroma announced a wind-down and urged users to bridge back to the Ethereum mainnet, tacitly admitting what the TVL numbers already showed: being “just another L2” isn't a viable business model.

The narrative of “infinite rollups” ran into power-law reality. Base captured structural liquidity by offering Coinbase's distribution and a consumer-friendly developer experience.

Arbitrum held onto its early-mover advantage and deep DeFi integrations. Everyone else fought over scraps, with most losing the battle as capital rotated toward chains with either network effects, institutional backing, or genuine product-market fit.

Top Layer 2 Crypto Assets by Market Cap

The dozens of incentive-driven L2s that hemorrhaged TVL throughout 2025 proved that launching a rollup is easy, but getting people to stay is the hard part.

Bitcoin treasury bet goes wrong

KindlyMD merged with David Bailey's Nakamoto Holdings to become a Bitcoin-treasury-plus-healthcare hybrid and became the cleanest example of how badly the digital asset treasury trade went.

The announcement prompted the NAKA stock price to a peak of $25.03. However, the shares traded at $0.37 as of press time, down by nearly 99% since the all-time high.

The shares shed over 50% in a single day after PIPE shares were unlocked, allowing early investors to sell into the market.

NAKA stock peaked at $23.05 following the KindlyMD merger, then crashed 99% to approximately $0.36 by year-end.

Unchained highlighted that the merger and PIPE financing massively expanded the share count, with SEC filings showing outstanding shares jumping from about 6 million to over 112 million around the deal.

KindlyMD still holds 5,398 BTC on its balance sheet, according to Bitcoin Treasuries, making it a top-20 public Bitcoin holder. Yet, the equity trades at a steep discount to its Bitcoin stash and faces Nasdaq delisting risk for trading below $1.

NAKA became the poster child for insider unlocks, aggressive leverage, and equity holders discovering that BTC on the balance sheet does not guarantee equity returns.

The pattern across 2025's biggest losers was consistent: opacity, excessive dilution, mercenary capital, and narratives that collapsed the moment retail could price them honestly.

The market punished projects that conflated marketing with product-market fit and founders who treated token launches as liquidity events rather than multi-year commitments.

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