RWA and Layer 1 Lead 2025 Crypto Gains as Meme Coins, AI, and Gaming Suffer Big Losses

The crypto market in 2025 was marked by stark contrasts between winning narratives and losing sectors. According to CoinGecko’s latest report, Real World Assets (RWA) emerged as the top-performing narrative this year, delivering an average price return of 185.8% year-to-date (YTD) across its major tokens.

Leading this surge was Keeta Network, which skyrocketed 1,794.9%, followed by Zebec Network at 217.3% and Maple Finance at 123.0%. Despite these impressive gains, RWA’s profitability was significantly lower than the previous year, which saw average returns of 819.5%.

Source: CoinGecko

Those that belonged to the Layer 1 category generally performed well, gaining an average of 80.3% year to date. Privacy-focused cryptocurrencies like Zcash and Monero led this charge, gaining 691.3% and 143.6% respectively.

RWA and the Layer 1 category were the only major stories that have enjoyed the past two years and have remained profitable, indicating their steady grip on the market.

Meme Coins and AI Crypto Face Sharp Losses

The Made in USA story performed quite well and closed out the year with an average gain of roughly 30.6%. However, this performance was mostly driven by the gain from Zcash, as it offset minor losses in other representative tokens. Narratives that are still popular among retail traders performed poorly in comparison.

Memecoins, AI-focused cryptos, suffered an average decline of 31.6% for the year, while the category for AI-related cryptos saw a drop of 50.2% year to date. Even major AI-related projects, such as Alchemist AI or Kite, could not completely mitigate the decline that other areas saw. The DeFi theme finished the year down 34.8% as the Layer 2 theme fell 40.6%.

Gaming, DePIN, and Solana Tokens Fall Hard

The year proved challenging both for the gaming industry and DePIN tokens. The largest GameFi tokens plunged from 40.1% to 92.5% YTD, and DePIN from 44.5% to 88.0% YTD.

Although the Solana chain remains the most preferred out of all blockchain networks, the Solana ecosystem faced an average decline of 64.2%. Only Jupiter’s JLP token increased slightly, with other essential Solana tokens plummeting heavily from 33.5% to 83.1% YTD.

Also Read: Bitcoin, Ethereum See Heavy Selling As Crypto Funds Lose $952 Million