Practical Tokens and Popular Tokens: Future Market Landscape Trends

Since the launch of Pump.fun, the cryptocurrency market has experienced multiple rounds of meme fever, continuing from April 2024 to early January 2025.

However, with the significant decline in the price of a certain well-known Token, investors are beginning to reassess the investment value of utility Tokens.

Utility tokens are often used as a means of payment for fees, which is common in many protocols and blockchain business models. Additionally, these protocols may also buy back or burn tokens, reflecting their fundamentals.

So, will the changes in the market landscape bring higher returns for utility Tokens?

1. Centralized exchange tokens perform more stably

After the issuance of a Meme Token related to a certain well-known figure, the Meme sector briefly surged, but it quickly cooled down within a month, resulting in a reversal of profits by February 1.

During the subsequent decline, the price of Meme Tokens continued to drop. Other sectors such as public chains, DeFi, and infrastructure tokens also experienced similar trends.

However, during this period, Bitcoin and centralized exchange tokens remained relatively stable, with the latter even experiencing a price increase.

2. In-depth Analysis of Centralized Exchange Tokens

Upon careful observation, it was found that among the 8 major centralized exchange tokens this year, 7 outperformed Bitcoin, and 6 achieved positive returns.

Tokenize Xchange performed outstandingly in the early stages, while a certain trading platform's Token achieved the highest annual growth rate.

So, why can centralized exchange tokens maintain a high level of stability?

3. Centralized Exchange Token Earnings Situation

One possible explanation is that the returns of centralized exchange tokens are higher (here, the returns refer to the amount of token burn or buyback).

In the past year, the average return on centralized exchange tokens relative to market capitalization reached 0.12, more than double that of the DeFi sector.

4. The Relationship Between Centralized Exchange Token Earnings and Returns

As mentioned earlier, among these centralized exchange tokens, a certain trading platform token has shown the most stable performance, which is highly correlated with its price returns from January 1, 2025, to March 18, 2025, and last year's earnings to market capitalization ratio. However, not all tokens follow the same trend. For instance, a certain trading platform token is located in the bottom right corner of the chart, as it achieved high returns in 2024, but this momentum did not carry over into 2025.

It is worth noting that some trading platforms did not publicly disclose any token burn or buyback records last year.

5. Conclusion

During market downturns, the prices of centralized exchanges may remain relatively stable due to expected returns. However, when evaluating various exchanges, there are still many factors that influence the changes in Token prices.

6. Research Methodology

This study selected 57 tokens from the top 100 projects by market capitalization, including:

• Confirm tokens with revenue or fee data
• Confirm tokens with no yield (such as meme tokens)

Not including:

• Wrapped Token
• Cross-chain Bridge Token
• Bitcoin
• Bitcoin hard fork coins