Delphi Digital@Delphi_Digital
Our new report “Evolution of Digital Asset Secondary Markets” is now Live!
Most tokens that launched in the past few years are now trading below their last private round valuations.
Based on proprietary data from @Second_Lane, secondary token opportunities priced at a discount to last round climbed from 52% in Q1 2024 to 69% through 2025. The bottom decile is now offered at 60% off or worse.
The easy read is that this is a bear market. Post launch disappointments are real, unlocks are heavy, and sentiment is close to historical lows.
But the discounts are exposing something underneath the cycle, something many of us have intuitively started to notice as market participants.
In earlier cycles, holding a token meant participating in the growth of the underlying network. That model ran into regulatory walls, so projects fell back on indirect value accrual mechanisms like DAO governance, buybacks, and staking rewards.
These structures are flexible, but they are difficult to enforce and add layers of complexity between the asset and the cash flows it's supposed to represent. Confidence in tokens as a value capture instrument eroded along with price.
The clearest evidence this is structural rather than cyclical is that not everything is discounting. Equity-heavy sectors are trading at premiums to last round right now. Tech Development, CeFi, and Wallet names are pricing between +3% and +19%. Token-heavy sectors like DeFi and Blockchain Infrastructure are discounting 8% to 16% over the same window.
Additionally, equity opportunities dominate larger ticket secondary opportunities and command a nearly 2x premium to token opportunities on average.
Tokens aren't cheap because crypto is in a bear market. They're cheap because the market has decided equity is a better way to capture value.
