The Era of Useful Tokens: What Survived 2025
Bitcointalk, the legendary forum launched by Satoshi Nakamoto and still frequented by early Bitcoin contributors, has wrapped up its annual "Altcoin Portfolio Contest."
I've mentioned this competition before in one of my Medium deep-dives, highlighting a recurring trend: no matter how creative or diversified the submitted portfolios are, a simple 100% Bitcoin allocation tends to outperform most of them. 2025 delivered the same story - the pure-BTC portfolio ranked 7th out of 40 participants.
The scale of losses among altcoins this year was staggering. Across all contestant portfolios, there were 108 unique crypto assets, and the breakdown looked brutal:
- 76 assets (around 3/4 of the list) dropped more than 70%
- 57 assets (over half) sank 80% or deeper
- 32 assets (almost 1/3) lost over 90% of their value
A real bloodbath for altcoins. Yet, out of 108, only 8 managed to close the year in the green. Here are the winners:
- Monero (XMR) +95.72%
- Tether Gold (XAUT) +60.17%
- PAX Gold (PAXG) +59.38%
- BNB (BNB) +21.78%
- Grin (GRIN) +21.52%
- EURC (EURC) +13.48%
- Hyperliquid (HYPE) +7.93%
- Jupiter Perpetuals Liquidity Provider Token (JLP) +2.26%
What connects these assets isn't hype or storytelling - it's utility:
- Two of them specialize in privacy, powering transfers meant to stay off the public radar.
- Three act as tokenized gold or regulated financial wrappers, simplifying access to assets that would otherwise involve heavy administrative friction.
- And three function as revenue-sharing tokens, letting holders tap into exchange or trading platform earnings.
The takeaway is clear: the market is quietly shifting toward assets that do something real, not just promise it. Demand is growing where the use case is obvious and practical.
And yes - I'm happy to point out that most of these top-performing assets can be swapped at the best rates on Rabbit.io.
