Practical Tokens and Popular Tokens: Analysis of Future Market Leaders

Since the launch of the Pump.fun platform, the market has experienced multiple rounds of meme Token frenzy, lasting from April 2024 to early January 2025.

However, as the price of a certain popular Token has plummeted, investors are beginning to question whether utility Tokens are more suitable for long-term investment.

Utility tokens are often used as protocol fees. This is a common business model among many blockchain projects and protocols. Additionally, these projects may also reflect their fundamentals through the buyback or destruction of tokens.

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

1. Centralized exchange tokens perform more steadily

After the launch of a popular meme Token, the meme sector quickly heated up, but just a month later it began to cool down, and by February 1st the returns had turned negative.

During the subsequent decline, the price of meme tokens continued to fall. Tokens in other areas such as public chains, DeFi, and infrastructure also experienced similar trends.

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

2. Centralized Exchange Token Analysis

In-depth observation reveals: Among the 8 centralized exchange tokens this year, 7 have outperformed Bitcoin, with 6 achieving positive returns.

The tokens of a certain exchange showed significant increases in the early stages, while the tokens of another exchange achieved the highest annual growth.

So, why do centralized exchange tokens perform more stably?

3. Centralized Exchange Token Revenue Analysis

One possible reason is that centralized exchange tokens have higher revenue (. Here, revenue refers to the amount of token burning or buyback ).

In the past year, the average income to market value ratio of centralized exchange tokens was 0.12, more than double that of DeFi projects.

4. The Relationship Between Centralized Exchange Token Income and Returns

As mentioned earlier, among these centralized exchange tokens, a certain exchange token has shown the most stable performance, reflecting significant price returns related to last year's revenue to market cap ratio during the period from January 1, 2025, to March 18. However, not all tokens follow the same trend. For example, although a certain exchange token had high returns in 2024, this high return did not continue into 2025. It is worth noting that some exchanges did not announce any token burn or buyback last year.

5. Summary

During market downturns, the price of tokens in the centralized exchange sector may remain robust due to expectations of revenue. However, when analyzing various exchanges, there are still many other factors influencing the changes in token prices.

6. Research Methods

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

• Confirm tokens with income or expense data
• Confirm that there are no income Tokens ( such as meme Tokens )

Not including:

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