thedefiant.io
In what many hoped would be crypto’s biggest year ever, most altcoins had a torrid time, consistently underperforming Bitcoin (BTC) and traditional assets.
Since the beginning of the year, the S&P 500 is up 17%, while BTC is down 6%, and the TradingView category? “Others,” which represents the altcoin space, is down a brutal 43%.
While BTC struggled relative to traditional financial assets and even outperformed for a portion of the year, the altcoin space was completely destroyed.
While the drawdown can be partially attributed to the fact that December 2024 and January 2025 marked cycle-high prices, potentially skewing data, the altcoin space has had trouble since the FTX collapse in November 2022.
Previous cycle winners such as decentralized finance (DeFi) names like LINK or AAVE, for example, are far from their previous all-time highs, even as they are still considered integral players in the sector. LINK is down 40% over the last year, and 76% from its all-time high, while AAVE is down 53% this year and 78% from its all time high.
Meanwhile, last cycle’s winners that failed to catch any real usage have been completely obliterated. Polkadot’s DOT token, for example, is down 73% over the last year, and 97% from its November 2021 all-time high, falling from $54 to just $1.77 in four years.
Pockets of Outperformance
There have been a few pockets of outperformance for “Others” vs BTC this cycle, however, these periods were driven by new tokens with locked supply coming to market, as opposed to actual liquid capital being invested into altcoins.
Perhaps more disappointing is that new altcoins from widely well-regarded protocols, such as Ethena and Pumpfun, are performing just as poorly.
ENA, which launched in April 2024, is down 78% over the last year even as the protocol reached an a all-time high in total value locked (TVL) of $15 billion in October 2025.
Pumpfun’s PUMP token, which ICO’d in July at a $4 billion valuation, enjoyed a brief stint of success catalyzed by its token buyback program, but has also struggled since and is also down 78% from its September all-time high.
While capital continues to pour onchain in the form of stablecoins and tokenized real world assets (RWAs), a majority of altcoin holders are down significant sums of money.
Privacy Rally
Despite the altcoin space cannibalizing itself, there have been a few notable winners in terms of large-cap altcoins in 2025, which some hope could lay the foundation for future innovation and investment.
The privacy sector in particular has had an incredible Q4, led by Zcash (ZEC) and Monero (XMR).
ZEC is up 800% this year, and 900% since September, while XMR is up 126% this year and 63% since September.
This flight to privacy is potentially a result of crypto’s new regulatory environment, which is seeing government agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) become increasingly relevant in the industry.
Another breakout product and token that is a little more straightforward in its role as an investment is Hyperliquid’s HYPE token. While HYPE is up technically less than 1% over the last 365 days, HYPE is up 733% since its November 2024 TGE, and reached as high as 1,900% above its TGE price when it reached an all-time high of $60 in September.
It is worth noting that HYPE bears a key difference to the rest of the altcoin space, in that it reinvests 99% of protocol revenues into token buybacks, with more than $1 billion in HYPE buys since the token launched.