The Great Reshuffle of the 2025 Crypto Market: RWA Dominates, Traditional Hot Concepts Come to an End in Unison

The 2025 cryptocurrency market data illustrates what “cycles turn” means. According to CoinGecko’s annual statistics, real-world asset tokenization (RWA) was the biggest winner with an average annual growth of 185.76%, with Keeta Network achieving an astonishing +1794.9% increase. Meanwhile, layer-one blockchain networks followed closely, with an annual increase of 80.31%, driven by strong performances from privacy coins like Zcash (+691.3%) and Monero (+143.6%), which became the core drivers of this sector.

The US-related crypto narrative ranked third, with an annual growth of 30.62%, also mainly benefiting from Zcash’s excellent performance. The strong growth in these three major areas contrasts sharply with the fading popularity of former market favorites.

Artificial intelligence concepts and Meme coins, although still in the spotlight, performed disappointingly in 2025, declining by 50.18% and 31.61%, respectively. The DeFi and DEX ecosystems also faced tough times, with declines of 34.79% and 55.53%. Second-layer scaling solutions continued their downward trend, with a full-year decline of 40.63%, marking the second consecutive year of negative returns.

The most pessimistic stories belong to the GameFi and DePIN sectors, which plummeted by 75.16% and 76.74%, respectively, making them the biggest losers of 2025. Even Solana, with a relatively mature ecosystem, couldn’t escape the downturn, declining by 64.17%, confirming that no sector was immune during this cycle.

This divergence reflects a major shift in market risk appetite: from virtual applications and hype back to the fundamental value of real assets—RWA is becoming a new direction for capital allocation.