FAIL ZONE: one of 24
What happened to the 1,972 tokens after they were released onto the market?
FAIL ZONE: 1 out of 24 —that’s how one might describe the results of a major study by Blockworks Research, in which the authors tracked the performance of 1, 972 crypto assets that managed to reach at least $50 million in circulating market capitalization between 2020 and 2025. Although we’re no longer talking about random micro-tokens but rather projects that have passed a significant market filter, the statistics turned out to be extremely poor: the median return was about −97%, roughly 73% of assets dropped by 90% or more at least once, and only a small portion of the market achieved truly strong long-term returns.
The term “FAIL ZONE” here does not imply that the projects examined were scams. It specifically refers to the outcome for the investor. A project may have a team, a product, users, and real infrastructure, but its token may still turn out to be an extremely weak investment asset.
The study began with 12,014 crypto assets
The initial dataset for Blockworks Research included 12,014 assets from CoinGecko. From this dataset, we excluded stablecoins, wrapped assets, liquid staking tokens, receipt tokens, tokenized real-world assets, duplicates, and other items that cannot be accurately compared to standard liquid tokens.
Only projects that had closed a month with a market capitalization of at least $50 million at least once were included in the main sample. This is an important limitation because the study does not cover the millions of small tokens that appear on launchpad platforms, fail to gain sustainable liquidity, and disappear within a few hours or days.
The situation is much worse for these types of assets.
In other words, the Blockworks study effectively examines the already filtered top tier of the market: projects that have managed to raise tens of millions of dollars in market capitalization, go public, gain liquidity, and attract the attention of market participants. Even after this selection process, the statistics turned out to be extremely negative.
The starting point for the analysis was the price at the end of the first month in which a token’s market capitalization exceeded $50 million. The authors then tracked subsequent returns, maximum gains, maximum losses, trading volumes, the token’s age, and its performance across different market cycles.
At the same time, defunct and delisted projects did not disappear from the statistics. This helps avoid the classic survivor bias, where only tokens that exist today are analyzed, while thousands of defunct assets are simply no longer taken into account.
Median result: minus 97%
One of the key figures from the study is −97%.
That turned out to be the median return on the tokens after they were included in the sample.
In monetary terms, a $10,000 investment would have shrunk to about $300. To recover to its original value after such a drop, the token would need to rise by more than 3,200%.
Moreover, −97% is not the result of a few particularly unsuccessful projects. It is the median, meaning that half of the tokens studied performed even worse.
For a market that is typically associated with higher risk in exchange for higher potential returns, this in itself is telling.
73% of tokens fell by at least 90%
About 73% of the assets in the sample studied lost 90% or more of their value at least once.
The median time until such a decline was approximately 13 months.
In other words, for a token that had already reached a market capitalization of $50 million, losing nearly all of its value was not a rare exception but one of the most common scenarios.
It is particularly important to note that we are not talking about the lowest segment of the market. These projects have already passed the initial launch phase, achieved liquidity, and grown to a significant market capitalization.
Nevertheless, most of them subsequently experienced a near-total collapse in price.
The older generations of tokens looked much better than the newer ones
When broken down by year, it becomes clear just how much the market structure has changed.
For tokens from the 2020 class, the median maximum return after being included in the sample was approximately 5.1x. Roughly 51% of these assets achieved a fivefold increase at least once, and about one-third reached 10x.
In other words, high risk was indeed accompanied by a significant probability of earning very high returns.
With newer generations of tokens, this picture has changed. For assets from recent years, the median maximum return has fallen to approximately 0.93x. In other words, the median new token has not even been able to consistently exceed the price at which it was included in the study.
Only about 3.9% of new assets achieved a fivefold increase. About 1.4% achieved a 10x increase .
The risk of a near-total collapse remains, while the likelihood of significant growth has decreased significantly.
New tokens are falling faster
Even more telling are the statistics showing a 90% decline over the first two years.
Among tokens from the 2020 cohort, this decline was observed in approximately 18% of projects. For the 2021 cohort, the figure rose to about 70%, and for tokens from the 2024 cohort, it reached about 86%.
The difference is huge.
This means that new generations of tokens not only end up deep in the red more often, but also lose most of their value much more quickly.
While at the beginning of the decade a project still had time to go through several market phases, identify demand, and build a loyal audience, the life cycle of new assets is increasingly proving to be significantly shorter.
They are already entering the market with a higher valuation
At the same time, the point at which the token becomes available to the broader market has also changed.
The percentage of projects that surpassed a $50 million market capitalization within the first month after listing rose from approximately 32% in 2020–2021 to 47% among more recent launches.
Starting in 2023, approximately 12.4% of tokens entered the research sample for the first time with a market capitalization already exceeding $250 million. Some projects began public trading with valuations exceeding $1 billion.
This suggests that a significant portion of a project’s valuation now takes place even before it fully enters the open market. First come seed rounds, funds, private rounds, OTC transactions, early allocations, and market makers, and only then does the token gain full public liquidity.
As a result, the average buyer is increasingly entering the market not at an early stage of growth, but only after a significant portion of the valuation has already been established.
The market in 2020–2021 was different
The period from 2020 to 2021 largely shaped the modern perception of altcoins. At that time, a significant number of assets did indeed see returns in the tens of times, and the likelihood of major gains was much higher.
During the bull market, approximately one in three tokens in the sample under study outperformed the market benchmark used by the study’s authors. There were 187 such top-performing tokens in total.
But later, the situation deteriorated sharply. About 86.1% of these former winners subsequently lost at least 90% of their value relative to November 2021 levels, and the median decline for the group was approximately −97.6%.
It turns out that even a successful market cycle was far from a guarantee of long-term stability for the token.
Exchange-traded tokens proved to be a notable exception
Against the general backdrop, tokens from centralized exchanges stood out in particular.
They accounted for only about 2.1% of the entire sample, but among the long-term winners, their share reached approximately 32%.
Of the 27 CEX tokens, seven—or about 26%—showed strong long-term performance . For the rest of the sample , the corresponding figure was around 1.2%.
Among the most stable assets of this type were BNB, OKB, GT, LEO, BGB, WBT, and MX.
Their main difference from most other tokens on the market is their connection to a real, functioning business. Trading fees, buyback programs, token burn mechanisms, and other ways of returning value to token holders create a more transparent economic model than that of a token that exists solely on the basis of expectations of future demand.
Meme coins do not affect the overall statistics
Certain meme coins give the impression that assets with enormous returns regularly appear on the market. PEPE, BONK, WIF, and other high-profile examples have indeed shown returns in the tens of times.
However, a sample of approximately 275 meme tokens yielded a median result of about −97%.
This clearly illustrates the problem with how the crypto market is perceived. The winners remain in the spotlight, receive thousands of media mentions, and are constantly held up as examples of potential returns. Most unsuccessful tokens simply disappear from the public eye.
As a result, a few successful projects create an impression that, statistically speaking, does not reflect the behavior of the entire category.
Even a strong market can't save the results
The authors also checked to see if the results were too negative because of a specific end date for the study.
To that end, the projections were based on December 2024, when the crypto market was in a significantly more favorable phase.
Even in this scenario, the median token had already lost about 81%, and approximately 82% of the entire sample was trading below the initial research price.
Consequently, the poor performance cannot be explained solely by an unfavorable market phase.
FAIL ZONE by the Numbers
If we summarize the entire study using a few key metrics, a fairly coherent picture emerges. The main sample consisted of 1,972 tokens, each of which had at one point reached a market capitalization of at least $50 million. The median return was approximately −97%, and roughly 73% of the projects lost at least 90% of their value at least once.
The median time to such a drop was about 13 months. Among the tokens launched in 2024, approximately 86% lost at least 90% of their value within the first two years. At the same time, only about 3.9% of new assets saw a fivefold increase in value, and about 1.4% reached a 10x increase .
And against this backdrop, a statistic emerges that gave this article its title: only about one token out of 24 was able to deliver a result that the study’s authors classified as a relative long-term winner.
This doesn't mean that the remaining 23 were scams. But it shows just how narrow the range of truly successful assets turned out to be, even after millions of the weakest and short-lived tokens were excluded from the analysis.
Conclusion KLJO
In the past, the high risk associated with cryptocurrency trading was partly justified by the high potential returns. Investors did indeed have a chance to earn 5x, 10x, or even more.
Currently, this model is performing noticeably worse: the risk of a sharp decline remains high, while the likelihood of significant growth after the token’s market launch is decreasing.
That is precisely why the market is increasingly shifting toward RWAs and tokenized real-world assets. It is becoming more important for investors to understand what exactly lies behind a token and where its value comes from. We have already discussed this shift and the reasons behind the growing interest in RWAs in the article “RWAs and Crypto Market Liquidity”
The market is gradually shifting from trading on promises to tokenizing what already has value.
Sources
- Blockworks Research — One in Twenty-Four: The Harsh Realities of Liquid Token Investing
https://app.blockworksresearch.com/unlocked/one-in-twenty-four - CoinGecko Research — Dead Coins: Over 50% of Cryptocurrencies Have Failed
https://www.coingecko.com/research/publications/how-many-cryptocurrencies-failed - CoinGecko Research — The Average Lifespan of Pump.fun Memecoins Is Less Than a Day
https://www.coingecko.com/research/publications/average-lifespan-of-pumpfun-tokens