Major Crypto Narratives Record -77% to +186% Returns in 2025

Which Crypto Narratives Have the Highest Returns?

RWA has emerged as the most profitable crypto narrative in 2025, with the highest average price returns of 185.8% year-to-date (YTD) across its largest tokens. The RWA narrative’s profitability was largely driven by the outperformance of Keeta Network (+1,794.9% YTD), Zebec Network (+217.3% YTD) and Maple Finance (+123.0% YTD). That said, the RWA narrative this year was only a quarter as profitable compared to last year’s 819.5% gains. 

The second most profitable narrative this year was layer 1, recording 80.3% in average price gains YTD. The layer 1 narrative is on track to end the year profitably due to privacy layer 1 blockchains Zcash and Monero, which have rallied 691.3% and 143.6% respectively during this period, placing them among the top crypto gainers. At the same time, Bitcoin Cash, BNB and Tron have also managed to hold onto some of their price gains, further contributing to the layer 1 narrative’s profitability this year.

Among the major narratives, RWA and layer 1 were the only narratives to mark a second consecutive year of profitability. 

The only other narrative that is on track to end the year profitably is Made in USA, which achieved an average gain of 30.6% YTD. This was entirely attributable to Zcash’s strong returns compensating for moderate losses posted by all the remaining Made in USA representative tokens. 

Meme Coins & AI Narratives See Losses Despite Popularity

Despite ranking as the most popular crypto narratives again this year, meme coins and artificial intelligence have posted average returns of -31.6% and -50.2% respectively YTD. The largest meme coins saw losses from 44.6% to 82.5% YTD, except for Ribbita by Virtuals. Similarly, except for Alchemist AI and Kite, the largest AI crypto are down 49.8% to 84.3% YTD. 

Notably, the DeFi narrative’s average returns of -34.8% was on par with the meme coins narrative this year, while the DEX narrative’s -55.5% was in line with the AI crypto narrative losses. Meanwhile, the layer 2 narrative recorded average returns of -40.6%, in a second consecutive unprofitable year.

Largest Losses Across Gaming & DePIN Narratives

The GameFi and DePIN narratives performed the worst among the major crypto narratives, posting the largest losses of 75.2% and 76.7% respectively YTD. The largest crypto gaming tokens saw prices drop 40.1% to 92.5% YTD, while the largest DePIN tokens fell 44.5% to 88.0% YTD.

The Solana ecosystem narrative experienced the third largest loss of 64.2% YTD, even though it remained the most popular blockchain ecosystem with the highest mindshare. Jupiter’s JLP was the only token to close the year with marginal price gains, as all other major Solana tokens fell 33.5% to 83.1% YTD.

Crypto Narrative Profitability 2025

The performance of major crypto narratives in 2025, ranked by average annual price returns across the largest narrative tokens, are as follows:

Most Profitable Crypto Narratives 2024

Crypto narratives’ performance in 2024, ranked by the average annual price returns across their 10 largest tokens:

Methodology

The study examined the most popular crypto narratives’ performance from January 1 to December 22, 2025, and January 1 to December 29, 2024. Narratives’ performances were calculated based on CoinGecko data for each narrative’s 10 biggest and most representative tokens’ average daily price returns compared to the start of the year, or the first day of available price data for tokens that were launched during the year. The representative tokens in each narrative were selected by their market capitalization ranking on the last day of the period, after excluding low organic activity assets. For the purposes of this study, crypto narratives that had a limited number of large market capitalization tokens or had high overlap with other narratives were excluded. 

This study is for illustrative and informational purposes only, and is not financial advice. Always do your own research and be careful when putting your money into any crypto or financial asset.

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Curious to find out more about our previous research studies & statistics? Check out this one we did on the DEX to CEX ratio for both spot and perpetuals trading volumes.