Crypto’s 2025 Meltdown: Turns Out ‘Hold’ Isn’t a Strategy, Just a Nap

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In 2025, the crypto market said, “Hold my decentralized beer,” and proceeded to turn the buy-and-hold strategy into a collective cry-for-help session.

Imagine buying a brand-new phone, only to find it loses 80% of its value by the time you get home. That was crypto in 2025-except it happened to, like, 11 million phones. Or tokens. Or whatever we’re calling these digital confetti pieces now.

Binance, Coinbase, or That One DEX Your Cousin Runs: Everyone Bombed

According to CryptoRank, which apparently hasn’t gone full existential crisis from analyzing this mess, Binance listed 100 tokens in 2025. Out of those, a shocking 93 are now worth less than a sad dollar-store novelties pack. The median return? 0.22x. Translation: for every $100 you “invested,” you now have enough to buy a slightly used sandwich.

Bybit wasn’t much better-150 listings, 127 of them in the red, median ROI of 0.23x. MEXC, the listing Olympics champion with 878 new tokens (yes, eight hundred seventy-eight), managed to have 747 of them go full extinction-level event. Their median return? 0.21x. At this point, flipping a coin would’ve been a more reliable investment strategy. Heads: buy crypto. Tails: light your money on fire. Same outcome.

Coinbase tried to be the responsible adult in the room, with a staggering 0.43x median ROI-the best among centralized exchanges. That’s right, they’re winning by losing slightly less. Kraken followed up with a 0.30x, which honestly feels like getting a participation trophy at a funeral.

And before you go blaming Binance like it’s the villain in this story-sorry, pal, but decentralized exchanges are just as sad. CryptoRank checked Hyperliquid, a major dapp in the perpetual futures world, and found… drumroll… almost identical performance. Shocking! Turns out, it’s not the exchange-it’s the entire planet of crypto that’s broken.

“Given the recent FUD about @binance and its listing performance, we used @HyperliquidX’s public API data to compare results, and they were almost the same. It’s pretty obvious we’d see a similar pattern across exchanges, so it’s unlikely to be solely the exchange’s fault,” the post read.

Translation: Everyone’s bad at this. No one gets a gold star. Not even the kid who brought homemade cookies.

Is Buy-And-Hold Dead? Or Did It Just Never Exist?

CryptoRank offered a diagnosis: 2025 birthed over 11 million new tokens. Eleven. Million. That’s more tokens than there are people who remember what the internet was like before influencers sold detox tea.

And most of them? “Low-quality,” the report gently called them. Which is corporate-speak for “scams with better branding than your local coffee shop.”

“Perhaps 2025 was not the best period for ‘buy and hodl.’”

“Perhaps” is doing so much work here. It’s like saying, “Perhaps flying a paper airplane into a hurricane wasn’t ideal.”

The total crypto market cap? Below $3 trillion in early 2026-lower than it was at the start of 2025 and roughly where it was in 2021. Also, we lost over $1 trillion since October. That’s not a correction. That’s a market-wide facepalm.

Investors are now asking: Can you just buy, hold, and ignore everything like it’s 2017? Analysts like Aporia are here to ruin your weekend:

“‘Just DCA and hold long-term’ worked when the asset class was being discovered. Now you’re competing with funds, algorithms, and literal scammers who treat your ‘conviction’ as exit liquidity. Passive strategies require passive markets. Crypto isn’t that. And holding isn’t a strategy. It’s the absence of one,” Aporia stated.

Meaning: Your “HODL” T-shirt isn’t armor. It’s a target.

Even CZ-yes, that CZ, former Binance overlord-weighed in, reminding us that “buy and hold” was never about buying every crypto ever created. Because if you did, he said, your portfolio would perform about as well as investing in “every internet or AI project.”

“If you ‘buy and hold’ all crypto ever created, you know how your portfolio will perform. Same as if you bought every internet or AI projects/companies,” CZ noted.

So maybe the real lesson isn’t that buy-and-hold is broken. Maybe it’s that we all pretended “buy anything with a whitepaper and a dream” was the same thing. Spoiler: It’s not.

Bottom line: If your investment strategy is “wait and see,” you’re not an investor. You’re a spectator at a really expensive trainwreck. And the only thing you’re holding long-term is regret.

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2026-01-29 11:36