Arca CIO on Why Crypto’s 2025 Rally Isn’t a True Bull Market and Why Some Tokens Have Outperformed

The chief investment officer of digital asset manager Arca is challenging the idea that 2025 represents a broad-based crypto bull market, arguing that only a handful of large-cap tokens are carrying the industry.

In an X thread posted Tuesday, Jeff Dorman wrote that “more than 75% of tokens in our coverage universe are negative year-to-date, and more than 50% of tokens are down 40% or more YTD.”

He added that some of the year’s few gainers have been “complete nonsense coins and memecoins that no serious investor would even look at,” citing litecoin LTC$116.14 and bitcoin cash BCH$647.92.

By contrast, the best-known names have done relatively well. Bitcoin BTC$117,470.30, ether (ETH), solana SOL$247.46, binance coin BNB$998.04 and XRP are all up between 20% and 40% this year, Dorman said.

He compared the dynamic to traditional finance, where large caps can rally while smaller stocks slump: “This is the TradFi equivalent of the DJIA and GameStop having a good year, while small caps are -40%.”

Dorman argued that this dispersion is ultimately healthy. Broad rallies, he said, breed complacency, while uneven performance forces investors to be more selective. “Nothing good comes from an everything rally, because no one learns anything,” he wrote. When weaker projects falter, he added, investors “start to ask questions like ‘how are you doing this?’”

Unlike in past cycles, he said, investors in 2025 cannot simply rely on momentum across altcoins. Instead, they must prioritize projects with tangible business models. “Own stocks and tokens that actually make money & buy back their own tokens with the profits,” Dorman said. “The days of throwing darts to make a fortune are over (i.e. Alt Season isn’t a thing).”

According to Dorman, the tokens and companies that have held up in 2025 generally fall into a few categories.

Assets connected to exchange-traded funds or digital asset trusts, such as BTC, ETH and SOL, are leading the way.

Crypto-related equities have also performed well, including Circle, Galaxy Digital, Coinbase and miners like Iris Energy and TeraWulf.

He also pointed to what he called “U.S. government coins,” namely XRP and Chainlink’s LINK token.

Finally, Dormann noted that revenue-generating tokens that distribute value back to holders — among them Hyperliquid’s HYPE, Pump.fun’s PUMP, Maple Finance’s MPL/SKY — have stood out as relative winners.

Earlier this year, Dorman had floated the idea of a crypto equivalent to the “FAANG” stocks. He suggested an acronym called the “BACHELORS”, naming tokens such as BNB, AERO, CAKE, HYPE, ENA, LEO, OKB, RAY and SKY (MKR). In his Sept. 16 thread, he updated that list to the “BARHEAPs,” incorporating newer projects like PUMP.

For Dorman, the lesson of 2025 is that crypto’s growth story is more complicated than headline gains might suggest. He argued that calling the year a “bull market” is misleading, since at best it represents a narrow cycle led by a few majors and select revenue-focused projects.

“The reason this has been a hard bull market is because it’s barely even a good year for crypto, let alone a bull market,” he wrote.