Utility Tokens and Popular Tokens: Analysis of Future Market Trends

From April 2024 to early January 2025, the crypto market experienced several rounds of hot Token trends. However, with the significant decline in the price of a well-known Token, investors began to reassess the investment value of utility Tokens.

Utility tokens are often used as fees for protocols or blockchains and are at the core of many projects' business models. Additionally, some projects also reflect their fundamentals by repurchasing or burning tokens. So, will a shift in market sentiment bring higher returns for utility tokens?

The performance of exchange platform tokens is more stable

After the launch of a certain popular Token, the related field quickly heated up, but the excitement only lasted for a month before it began to cool down. By February 1, the returns on the related Token had already reversed.

In the subsequent market adjustment, the prices of popular tokens continued to decline. Other areas such as public chains, DeFi, and infrastructure tokens also experienced similar trends.

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

In-depth Analysis of Trading Platform Tokens

In-depth observation reveals: In the first three months of 2025, 7 out of 8 major exchange platform tokens outperformed Bitcoin, with 6 achieving positive returns.

A certain trading platform's Token showed significant gains in the early stages, while another platform's Token achieved the highest annual growth.

So, why do exchange platform tokens perform more stably?

The Earning Capacity of Trading Platform Tokens

One possible reason is that trading platform tokens have higher yield capabilities (here, yield refers to the amount of token burn or buyback).

In the past year, the average return on trading platform tokens relative to market value reached 0.12, more than double that of DeFi projects.

Relationship between Trading Platform Token Earnings and Returns

As mentioned earlier, the tokens of a certain trading platform have shown the most stability, reflecting a significant correlation between their price returns from January 1 to March 18, 2025, and last year's return on market capitalization. However, this does not mean that every token will follow the same trend. For instance, the token of another trading platform is located in the bottom right corner of the chart because its high returns in 2024 could not be sustained into 2025.

It is noteworthy that four trading platforms did not announce any token burns or buybacks last year.

Conclusion

During a market downturn, the prices of tokens in the trading platform sector may remain relatively robust due to expectations of returns. However, when evaluating individual exchanges, there are still many other factors driving token price changes.

Research Methods

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

• Confirm tokens with revenue or fee data
• Confirm tokens without earnings (such as popular tokens)

Not including:

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