Coinbase’s 2025 Post-Mortem: How Platform Listings Failed to Prevent Crypto’s Biggest Collapses
As 2025 draws to a close, the cryptocurrency landscape reveals a sobering narrative that contrasts sharply with the year's initial optimism. Market participants entered 2025 anticipating a maturation phase characterized by regulatory clarity and robust institutional adoption. Instead, the year unfolded as a stark lesson in how quickly ambitious narratives can disintegrate when confronted with market realities and underlying project frailties. The dramatic declines of several high-profile assets, including Movement Labs and KindlyMD, underscore a recurring cycle within the crypto ecosystem: projects launch amidst significant fanfare and media hype, attract substantial user fees and investment, only to later unravel as opaque side deals, diluted technological promises, and governance failures come to light. This pattern of 'hype and collapse' has left a significant mark on investor portfolios and trust. For a major exchange like Coinbase, which serves as a primary gateway for institutional and retail investors into the crypto market, the performance of listed assets is of paramount importance. The exchange's due diligence processes, listing criteria, and ongoing monitoring face renewed scrutiny in the wake of these collapses. The case of Movement Labs is particularly illustrative. Initially touted as a promising scaling solution for the Ethereum network, its trajectory from a celebrated launch to a precipitous decline encapsulates the risks inherent in projects that prioritize marketing over substantive, sustainable development. The fallout from such events extends beyond individual token prices, impacting overall market sentiment, regulatory perceptions, and the credibility of the digital asset class as a whole. This trend in 2025 highlights a critical juncture for the industry. It emphasizes that mere listing on a reputable platform like Coinbase is not an implicit guarantee of a project's long-term viability or ethical foundation. The year's biggest losers demonstrate that core issues of transparency, genuine utility, and responsible governance remain unresolved challenges. As the market looks toward 2026, the lessons of 2025 will likely pressure exchanges, investors, and project teams alike to demand higher standards, more rigorous disclosure, and a fundamental shift from speculative narrative-building to the delivery of tangible, operational value. The path to true maturation appears longer and more arduous than many had hoped at the start of the year.
The 10 Biggest Crypto Losers of 2025: A Tale of Hype and Collapse
2025 was heralded as the year crypto would mature, with regulatory clarity and institutional adoption finally taking root. Instead, it became a cautionary tale of how quickly narratives unravel when opacity meets market reality. Projects like Movement Labs and KindlyMD epitomized the cycle: launch with fanfare, extract fees, then watch as side deals and diluted promises surface.
Movement Labs, once a promising ethereum scaling solution, collapsed under the weight of scandal. Reports revealed 66 million MOVE tokens—5% of supply—were funneled to a market maker linked to Web3Port. The tokens flooded the market, triggering a delisting from Coinbase and the ousting of co-founder Rushi Manche. Governance, it seems, was little more than theater.
What ties these failures together isn’t bad luck—it’s a playbook. Sell the dream to retail, negotiate sweetheart deals with insiders, and let liquidity vanish when the music stops. The result? A master class in how not to build trust in an industry desperate for legitimacy.
Bitcoin Long-Term Holders Halt Selling Amid Market Noise
Bitcoin's long-term holders have ceased their recent sell-off, according to on-chain data, but the true market dynamics remain obscured by large custodial movements. These seasoned investors—who weathered the 2021-2022 downturn—typically draw attention during extreme market volatility, alternately praised as visionaries or vilified as opportunists.
The narrative of mass LTH divestment gained traction in recent weeks as Bitcoin's price corrected, with analysts interpreting moving coins as bearish signals. Darkfrost's LTH supply change metric, however, now shows the first green candle since mid-July, suggesting selling pressure may be abating. CryptoQuant's Ki Young Ju corroborated this shift on social media platform X.
Complicating analysis, Coinbase executed major internal wallet migrations in late November—routine security upgrades that temporarily distorted on-chain metrics. Such institutional activity frequently muddies the waters for retail traders seeking clear signals from blockchain data.
