Outside BTC and TAO, Most Top 25 Cryptos Are Basically Garbage

This article is based on a hand-compiled August 2025 dataset (by Joseph Jacks) covering ~25 large-cap assets valued above Bittensor and below Bitcoin (excluding wrapped/staked/meme tokens).

The uncomfortable snapshot

JJ’s dataset paints a blunt picture of the non-BTC large-cap tier:

• ~10 years old on average — ~97% of these networks didn’t exist a decade ago.

• ~50% of company HQs in the U.S. — corporate gravity, not grassroots cypherpunk.

• ~$60B average market cap — yet > $250M average venture funding and >$5B total across the list.

• >66% of supply pre-mined on average with >50B average token supply caps (many “unlimited”).

• Only rare exceptions approach fair-launch + hard-cap design. Monero which could be an exception was recently 51% attacked.

Individually, any one of these traits might be fine. Together, they describe a sector that looks more like VC-issued software credits than credibly neutral money or infrastructure.

Reasons most of these big caps may be structurally flawed

1. Centralized issuance, centralized control
   Massive pre-mines concentrate power with foundations, insiders, and early investors. Governance becomes a polite fiction when a few wallets can set policy.

2. Elastic or “infinite” supply
   Unlimited or sky-high caps turn tokens into liquidity hub whose value bleeds over time. Scarcity stories collapse the moment issuance becomes a bail out.

3. VC time-horizons ≠ protocol time-horizons
   With hundreds of millions raised, exit pressure often precedes credible utility. Liquidity events can outrun adoption.

4. Opaque risk
   Black-box treasuries, discretionary token unlocks, and foundation interventions create hidden liabilities that only surface in stress.

5. Misaligned narratives
   Tokens marketed as “decentralized” routinely pause chains, rewrite rules, or rely on permissioned actors. That’s not crypto. That’s a corporate network with a tradable point system.

Why the exceptions stand out

• Bitcoin is a one-of-one: fair launch, fixed supply, credibly neutral monetary policy, and the most hardened social consensus in the industry.

• Bittensor ($TAO) hews closer to Bitcoin’s monetary discipline (21M hard cap, halvings) while targeting a radically larger frontier: open markets for machine intelligence. Instead of selling token to VCs, it coordinates compute, data, and models into a competitive marketplace. If AI continues to permeate every industry, TAO’s addressable value is orders of magnitude beyond “another payments chain.”

The takeaway from this analysis isn’t that everything above TAO is a scam; it’s that most of it is structurally misdesigned for durable value capture. They’re equity-like tokens in protocol clothing.

A simple filter for non-garbage

When evaluating any large-cap token, ask:

1. Issuance: Hard-capped or VC-controlled? Who can change it?

2. Distribution: Was there a fair launch? How concentrated are holdings?

3. Permissionlessness: Can anyone run critical roles without on-chain community-wide approval?

4. Economic sink: What real, recurring demand burns/locks the token beyond speculation?

5. Adversarial resilience: What happens under censorship, regulation, or hostile coordination?

6. Time: Has it survived multiple market cycles without governance bailouts?

Most of today’s top-25 fail several of these checks. That’s why the label “may be total garbage” fits—not as an insult, but as a risk diagnosis.

The bigger picture

The $1.5T layer above Bittensor isn’t a hall of fame; it’s a heat map of where speculative liquidity rests today. If value accrues to credibly neutral primitives and real marketplaces, then TAO is a leading contender to absorb value from networks that look like VC-issued credits with tickers.

Data doesn’t lie. The shiny marketing of most of these tokens could.