Analysis and Insights

We tracked unicorn tokens, the crypto assets with a market cap above $1 billion, across multiple market cycles to see how the composition of the market has changed.

The 2021 Top 100 reflected the market at a very different stage: new Layer 1s, metaverse tokens, gaming platforms, and exchange tokens dominated the rankings. Five years later, that list looks very different. In this article, we examine what happened to the projects that were in the Top 100 back in 2021.

In this research, we compiled a list of the largest airdrops in the history of the crypto market and compared their value at their all-time highs with their current valuations. The combined ATH value of the top 50 airdrops reached nearly $85 billion, though a significant portion of that amount came from just a few projects.

A breakdown of the crypto sectors with the largest market-cap changes between June 2025 and June 2026.

NewsWire Research compared average and median funding round sizes, revealing how unevenly venture capital is distributed across different crypto sectors. Some segments are growing thanks to a few mega-deals, while others consistently attract large investments across the entire market.

Liquid staking entered Q2 2026 with a divergence: in USD terms, the sector is weakening sharply, but in ETH terms, user participation remains close to record levels.

Over the past two years, we have seen a gradual decline in interest in token sales, and it seems this narrative reached the bottom in Q2 2026. Read on to understand how the market has changed and what factors drive those changes.

Capital deployed through crypto M&A transactions increased from $272M in Q4 2025 to $7.23B in Q2 2026, representing a more than 26x increase in just six months.

The second quarter of 2026 has been challenging for most major cryptocurrencies. Despite several brief rallies in April and May, the market came under renewed pressure as June progressed. What stands out, however, is not the overall decline but the widening performance gap between individual assets.

Among the eight projects analyzed, only four managed to expand their FDV after launch, while the remaining projects experienced substantial valuation declines.