Fixygen: the worst crypto startups and anti-cases of 2025 — where the market punished hardest

If 2024 was the year of “survival,” 2025 became the year of “punishment for weak security and tokenomics.” According to Chainalysis, more than $3.4 billion was stolen in 2025, with a single incident – the Bybit compromise in February – accounting for about $1.5 billion. Industry security reviews also recorded losses of “more than $4 billion” for the year and a growing share of incidents caused by operational failures. 1) Altcoins with a failed TGE: the “token graveyard” Toward the end of the year, calculations appeared showing that about 85% of the tokens launched in 2025 trade below their starting prices – that is, most launches failed to hold demand and liquidity. 2) Memecoin scandals: the $LIBRA case in Argentina A high-profile counterexample is the story of $LIBRA: after a public mention by the president of Argentina, the token soared and then collapsed, leading to investigations and fraud allegations. 3) Closures of NFT marketplaces as a signal that “the market has not returned” NFT infrastructure continued to shrink. X2Y2 announced the wind-down of its marketplace in spring 2025. LG closed Art Lab – an NFT marketplace for TVs – in summer 2025, explicitly citing a change of focus because of the market. 4) Social engineering and hacks instead of “pure” DeFi exploits: the Venus case A telling episode of the year — attacks through the human factor. In the Venus Protocol case, attackers used a Zoom compromise/social engineering to gain control over a user’s actions and put about $13 million at risk. 5) Centralized services as “points of catastrophe” Even as DeFi grows more mature, the largest losses increasingly occur in centralized services because of compromised keys and transaction-signing processes — and this concentrates risk in single events. Fixygen’s main takeaway In 2025, the “worst” performers were not those with less marketing, but those with: 1) weak operational security and access control, 2) toxic tokenomics and bloated issuance, 3) a product with no real utility (especially in NFT/GameFi), 4) a bet on a short-term pump instead of infrastructure and partnerships.