After the launch of Pump.fun, the market experienced several meme-focused frenzies, lasting from April 2024 to early January 2025.
However, after $TRUMP’s price dropped significantly, investors began to question whether utility tokens are worth investing in in the future.
Utility tokens are usually used as fees. This is common in the business models of many protocols and blockchains. In addition, these protocols may also buy back or burn tokens, which can reflect fundamentals.
Will the shift in the market lead to higher returns for utility tokens?
1/ CEX tokens are more stable
The meme space surged after the launch of Trump’s Meme Token, but cooled within a month, with gains reversing by February 1.
In the subsequent decline, the price of Meme tokens continued to fall. Other areas, including chain, DeFi and infrastructure tokens have also experienced similar trends.
However, during this period, BTC and CEX Token remained stable, with CEX Token even increasing in price.
2/ CEX Analysis
A closer look: 7 out of 8 CEX tokens have outperformed BTC this year, with 6 achieving positive price returns.
Tokenize Xchange showed significant gains in its early stages, while Gate.io’s token achieved the highest yearly growth.
So, why are CEX tokens more stable?
3/ CEX Token Income
One possible reason is that CEX tokens have higher revenue (revenue refers to the amount of tokens destroyed or repurchased).
Over the past year, the average revenue-to-market cap ratio for CEX tokens was 0.12, more than double that of DeFi.
4/ CEX Token Income and Returns
As mentioned before, among these CEX tokens, gatechain-token shows the most stable performance, reflecting its significant price return in relation to its ratio of revenue to market capitalization last year between January 1 and March 18, 2025. However, this does not mean that every token will follow the same trend. For example, Bitget's token is in the bottom right corner because it had a high return in 2024, but this return could not be sustained into 2025. Note: whitebit, leo-token, kucoin-shares and tokenize-xchange did not record any announcements of token destruction or buybacks last year.
5/ Conclusion
During a market downturn, prices in the CEX space may remain robust due to expectations of revenue. However, when looking at individual exchanges, many other factors continue to drive changes in token prices.
6/ Methodology
57 tokens were selected from the top 100 projects by market cap, including: > Tokens with confirmed revenue or expense data > Tokens with confirmed no revenue (e.g., meme tokens) Excluding: > Wrapper tokens > Bridge tokens > BTC > BTC hard forks
