Utility Tokens vs Meme Tokens: Future Market Trend Analysis

From April 2024 to early January 2025, the cryptocurrency market experienced multiple waves of excitement in the Meme sector. However, as the price of a certain well-known Token plummeted, investors began to reassess the investment value of utility Tokens.

Utility tokens are often used as transaction fees for protocols or blockchains. Many projects also reflect their fundamentals by repurchasing or burning tokens. So, will changes in the market landscape bring higher returns for utility tokens?

The performance of the trading platform Token is stable

After the launch of a meme token related to a certain celebrity, the meme sector rapidly heated up in a short period, but began to cool down within a month, experiencing a reversal in gains by February 1, 2025.

Subsequently, the price of Meme Token continued to decline. Tokens in other areas such as public chains, DeFi, and infrastructure projects also experienced similar trends.

However, during the same period, Bitcoin and exchange platform Tokens remained relatively stable, with the latter even experiencing a price increase.

Analysis of Exchange Platform Token Performance

In-depth observation reveals: Since 2025, 7 out of 8 major trading platform tokens have outperformed Bitcoin, with 6 achieving positive returns.

The token of a certain emerging trading platform showed significant increases in the early stages, while the token of another well-known platform achieved the highest annual growth.

What is the reason for the stable performance of the trading platform token?

Trading Platform Token Revenue Analysis

One possible explanation is that the earnings from the trading platform Token are higher (here, earnings refer to the amount of Token destruction or buyback).

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

The Relationship Between Earnings and Returns

As mentioned earlier, the tokens of a well-known trading platform have shown the most stable performance, which is closely related to their price returns from January 1 to March 18, 2025, and last year's earnings-to-market-cap ratio. However, not all tokens follow the same trend. For example, a trading platform's token had a high return rate in 2024 but failed to maintain that momentum into 2025.

It is worth noting that some trading platforms did not disclose any information about token burn or buyback last year.

Conclusion

During market downturns, the token prices in the trading platform sector may remain relatively stable due to earnings expectations. However, when evaluating various exchanges, there are still many other factors that influence the changes in token prices.

Research Methods

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

• Confirm tokens with profit or fee data
• Confirm tokens with no yield (such as Meme tokens)

Not including:

• Wrapped Token
• Cross-Chain Bridge Token
• Bitcoin
• Bitcoin hard fork coins