Practical tokens and meme tokens: Who will dominate the future?

After the launch of Pump.fun, the market has experienced several meme crazes, from April 2024 to early January 2025.

However, after the price of $TRUMP fell sharply, investors began to question whether practical tokens are worth investing in the future.

Practical tokens are usually used as fees. This is common in many protocols and blockchain business models. In addition, these agreements may also repurchase or destroy tokens, which can reflect fundamentals.

For practical tokens, will the market change bring higher returns?

1/ CEX tokens are more stable

The Meme field soared rapidly after Trump’s Meme token launch, but cooled in a month, with earnings flipped by February 1.

During the subsequent decline, the price of Meme tokens continued to fall. Tokens in other areas, including chains, DeFi and infrastructure, have also experienced similar trends.

However, during this period, BTC and CEX tokens remained stable, and CEX tokens even rose in price.

2/ CEX Analysis

In-depth observation: Of the 8 CEX tokens this year, 7 outperformed BTC, and 6 of them achieved positive price returns.

Tokenize Xchange showed significant gains in its early stages, while Gate.io's token achieved the highest annual growth.

So, why are CEX tokens more stable?

3/ CEX Token Income

One possible reason is that CEX tokens have higher income (revenue refers to the amount of tokens destroyed or repurchased).

Over the past year, the average revenue to market capitalization ratio of CEX tokens is 0.12, more than twice that of DeFi.

4/ CEX Token Income and Return

As mentioned earlier, gatechain-token shows the most stable performance among these CEX tokens, reflecting its significant price returns related to its revenue-to-market cap ratio 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 located in the lower right corner because it has a high return in 2024, but this return cannot last until 2025. Note: Whitebit , leo-token , kucoin-shares and tokenize-xchange did not record any announcements of token destruction or repurchase last year.

5/ Summary

During the market downturn, prices in the CEX sector may remain solid due to expectations of revenue. However, many other factors are still driving changes in token prices when looking at various exchanges.

6/ Methodology

57 tokens were selected from the top 100 items in the market cap, including: > Tokens that confirm with revenue or fee data > Tokens that confirm without revenue (e.g. meme tokens) Excluding: > Packaging Tokens> Bridge Tokens> BTC > BTC Hard Forks