What Weak 2025 Token Listing Returns Suggest About Buy-and-Hold Investing
Weak 2025 token listing returns across major exchanges suggest traditional buy-and-hold investing may be failing due to massive, low-quality token issuance.Summary
Data from CryptoRank for 2025 shows that newly listed tokens on major exchanges like Binance, Bybit, and MEXC overwhelmingly resulted in negative returns, with median ROIs well below 1x (e.g., Binance at 0.22x). Even Coinbase's best performance among centralized exchanges yielded a median ROI of only 0.43x. This poor performance was observed across centralized exchanges and decentralized platforms like Hyperliquid, suggesting broader market conditions, rather than specific venues, were the cause.
CryptoRank attributed this weakness to the massive scale of token issuance in 2025, with over 11 million new, often "low-quality," tokens entering the market. This has led analysts to question the relevance of passive strategies like buy-and-hold or dollar-cost averaging in the current crypto environment, which is now saturated and competitive.
Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) offered a nuanced view, clarifying that the buy-and-hold principle should not apply to every token created. He implied that the strategy might still be viable, but only when applied selectively to a small subset of high-quality projects, rather than broadly across the entire asset class.
(Source：BeInCrypto)