RWA and Layer 1 Dominate 2025 Crypto Gains While Meme Coins, AI, and Gaming Crash Hard

Forget the hype cycles—2025's crypto market just delivered a brutal reality check. The speculative darlings of yesterday bled out while foundational infrastructure and real-world assets quietly printed generational wealth.

The Winners: Substance Over Sizzle

Real-World Asset (RWA) tokenization didn't just grow; it exploded. Think tokenized treasury bills, real estate, and commodities finally moving from PowerPoint to portfolio, attracting institutional capital that scoffed at dog-themed jokes. Layer 1 blockchains, the digital economies' foundational rails, saw their valuations surge as developer activity and user adoption hit escape velocity. These weren't pumps; they were migrations of value.

The Losers: The Speculative Hangover

Meanwhile, the casino closed. Meme coins—those monuments to viral sentiment—crashed back to Earth, proving once again that a community-driven 'vibe' is a terrible store of value. The AI and gaming sectors, once touted as the next frontier, faced a reckoning. Overpromised utility met underwhelming delivery, and the smart money got out fast. It was a classic case of narrative fatigue meeting a balance sheet—and the balance sheet won, as it tends to do when the free money stops flowing.

The lesson for 2026 is stark: in a mature market, capital seeks utility and cash flow, not just a good story and a charismatic influencer. The era of 'number go up' on pure speculation is taking a long, hard pause—much to the chagrin of traders who still think a financial revolution shouldn't involve fundamentals.

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.