Blockworks Research and Messari said in a new report that only a small fraction of liquid tokens have managed to outperform Bitcoin. Of the 1,972 tokens that reached at least $50 million in circulating market capitalization between 2020 and 2025, only about 4.1% ultimately beat BTC. Put another way, roughly one out of every 24 tokens that entered investors’ field of view outperformed a passive Bitcoin holding strategy.
The report is titled "One in Twenty-Four: The Harsh Realities of Liquid Token Investing." Its sample includes all tokens that at some point crossed the $50 million circulating market cap mark. The dataset comes from CoinGecko and Blockworks Research, and it also includes projects that later died or were delisted.
How the report measured declines
The study used the month-end price after a token first reached a $50 million market cap as the entry point, then tracked whether the token later fell to 10% or less of that entry price. On that basis, the report said the decay rate of newly issued tokens has accelerated in recent years.
For the 2024 cohort, nearly 90% of tokens had fallen more than 90% from their entry price within about 30 months. The 2021, 2022 and 2023 cohorts showed a similar path of decline.
Median returns by cohort
As of June 2026, the median return for the 2020 cohort stood at -94%, and only 2% of that group outperformed BTC. The median return was -99% for both the 2021 and 2022 cohorts, -97% for 2023, and -98% for 2024.
The 2025 cohort was at -88% for now, with 19% outperforming BTC. The report’s chart separately noted that this group remains relatively young, and that its full-cycle performance still needs more time to develop.
Older survivors and where the winners clustered
The chart also showed that tokens already in the market before 2020 looked different from later cohorts. For that older survivor group, the median return from entry to the present was about -58%, and 12% outperformed BTC. That was notably better than most token cohorts launched after 2020.
The outperformance that did exist was concentrated. Among 22 tokens with at least 24 months of history that beat BTC, centralized exchange tokens accounted for 32%. In the corresponding sample of 1,305 tokens, exchange tokens made up only 2%.