According to BlockBeats, on August 5th, Blockworks Research/Messari released a new report exposing the brutal odds of altcoin investing. Data shows that of the 1,972 tokens that surpassed a circulating market capitalization of $50 million between 2020 and 2025, only about 4.1% ultimately outperformed Bitcoin. This means that out of every 24 tokens that come to investors' attention, only about 1 can beat a passive BTC holding strategy.
The report, titled "One in Twenty-Four: The Harsh Realities of Liquid Token Investing," uses a sample of all tokens that have ever reached a circulating market capitalization of $50 million. The data sources are CoinGecko and Blockworks Research, and it also includes projects that have been discontinued or delisted.
The report shows that if the entry price is set at the end of the month after the token first reaches a market capitalization of $50 million, and then the token price is observed to have fallen to 10% or less of the entry price, the rate of decline for newly issued tokens in recent years has accelerated significantly. In the 2024 batch, nearly 90% of the tokens had already fallen by more than 90% from their entry price within approximately 30 months; the 2022 and 2023 batches also showed a similar downward trend.
The median returns for token batches in each year are even more dismal. As of June 2026, the median return for the 2020 batch was -94%, outperforming BTC by only 2%; the median returns for the 2021 and 2022 batches were both -99%; 2023 saw a return of -97%; and 2024 a return of -98%. The 2025 batch is currently at -88%, outperforming BTC by 19%, but the report's charts specifically indicate that this batch is still relatively young, and its performance after the full cycle remains to be seen.
It's worth noting that established tokens that entered the market before 2020 have performed relatively well. The report's charts show that this group of "survivors" has a median return of approximately -58% since entering the market, outperforming BTC by 12%, significantly better than most new token batches after 2020.
The few winners are also highly concentrated. The report's charts show that among the 22 tokens with at least 24 months of history that outperformed BTC, centralized exchange platform tokens accounted for 32%; while in the corresponding sample of 1,305 tokens, platform tokens accounted for only 2%.