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Today's News Recap
Orb Arrival - Sam Altman's eye-scanning crypto project World launches in the US with plans for Visa, Tinder pilot, and eye- scanning orbs in six cities.
Robinhood Rallies - Robinhood beats Q1 estimates despite dip in revenue and crypto trading.
Bitcoin Expansion - Metaplanet registers U.S. Treasury arm to expand Bitcoin reserve strategy.
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New Research Podcast
In this Fully Diluted episode, Messari’s Dylan Bane sits down with HiveMapper CEO Ariel Seidman to explore how real-world utility—not faster chains—is the next frontier for crypto.
They discuss the evolution of HiveMapper’s AI-powered mapping network, sustainable tokenomics in DePIN, and the growing demand from commercial fleets and logistics players. Ariel also shares why shifting the industry's focus toward applications—and away from casino culture—is critical for crypto to grow into a meaningful global asset class.
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Two Bits
The Great Crypto Die-Off and What Follows
By: Mohamed Allam
The other day, I found an article that stopped me for a second. Over 52% of all cryptocurrencies listed on GeckoTerminal have “failed.” That’s 3.7 million tokens out of nearly 7 million that have disappeared. No trading, no liquidity, no signs of life. Just gone.
At first, it seemed shocking. Then I remembered we’re in crypto. This space was built for experimentation, and with that comes a lot of failure. But even with that in mind, the scale still hits different. Millions of tokens created in just a few years, and most already wiped out. The sheer volume is hard to ignore.
What makes it even more interesting is the timing. Nearly half of these failures happened in the first quarter of 2025 alone. That’s 1.8 million tokens in just three months. The data lines up closely with a broader market cooldown that began earlier this year. Political volatility picked up, especially with Trump’s return to the White House in January. Risk appetite dropped. Liquidity dried up. And almost overnight, the party ended.
But there’s another layer to this. Part of the reason for the explosion in token count over the past few years is how easy it has become to create them. Platforms like pump.fun made launching a token almost effortless. All it takes is a bit of SOL and a decent meme. This lowered the barrier to entry to the point where launching a token became more of a social experiment than a real project. In 2021, there were around 428,000 tokens listed on GeckoTerminal. By 2025, that number was nearing 7 million.
That kind of growth without quality control has predictable consequences. Most of these tokens never had a chance. They were short-term plays, cash grabs, or jokes that never got off the ground. And now they are being flushed out of the system. In many ways, it resembles what happened during the dot-com bubble. Nearly half of all internet companies from that era didn’t survive past 2004, but out of that collapse came giants like Amazon and Google. The failures were simply a part of the process, in creating the internet as we know it today.
Crypto might be going through something similar: a cleansing of noise, a cycle reset. When too much cheap capital chases too many bad ideas, eventually, the market reverts. What we are seeing now may be the beginning of that reversion. The question is what comes next.
There are a few ways this could play out:
Alt season: The start of a new cycle
This is the optimistic take. The junk is getting flushed out, and stronger projects are starting to surface. Capital rotates back into quality. Infrastructure improves. New narratives catch on. We have seen this before — every crypto bull market begins after a brutal winter. Every alt season follows a mass extinction. From this view, the worst is behind us, and the next wave of innovation is ready to break out.A bigger bubble waiting to pop
This interpretation sees the current shakeout not as a reset but as a pause before a deeper drawdown. Maybe the mania of 2021 to 2024 ran too hot, and we are still mid-cycle. Liquidity is thinning out, speculation remains rampant in pockets, and real adoption has not caught up to valuations. In this case, a recovery could be a temporary bounce before another leg down.The beginning of a global recession
This is the most pessimistic scenario. Global macro continues to tighten, rate cuts get pushed, inflation lingers, and political instability and geopolitical risk keep capital frozen. If the broader economy slips into a recession, crypto doesn’t get a free pass. Alt season gets pushed out indefinitely. What follows is not another cycle but a grind: less innovation, less attention, and more pain in markets, not just digital assets.
Each outcome is plausible. The uncertainty lies less in crypto and more in what happens globally. What’s clear is that the easy phase is over. Memes will still have a place, and people will continue to mint nonsense — that part of the culture isn’t going anywhere. But real growth has to come from fundamentally solid tokens, the ones quietly building through the noise, even as they get butchered in the short term.
We’re watching a massive reset unfold in real time. Whether this leads to the next rally or a deeper correction depends more on macro conditions than token mechanics. Either way, the experiment continues.
Note: I’d love to hear your opinions and want to explore and incorporate them into next week’s newsletter. Reach out whether you agree, disagree, or have a completely different take. I’m always open to new perspectives and would happily include your thoughts in the next piece.
Source: CoinGecko
That’s all for today, folks! As always, contact me on LinkedIn if you have ideas or suggestions for future newsletters. Until next time!
