The First Phase of the Declining Altcoins: DEX Edition

$1INCH
King of aggregators, all-time high $7.78, current price $0.088 (-98.7%). At its peak, nearly $800 billion in trading volume, processing $214 billion annually in 2025, the protocol’s fundamentals still hold. But the token has become an exit channel for early capital—team addresses continuously unlock and sell, with a single sell order of $5.04 million triggering a 16.7% drop in price. Under liquidity exhaustion, governance tokens and protocol value have completely decoupled. The protocol won, but the token lost.
$SUSHI
Starting as a “Vampire Fork,” with an all-time high of $23.38, now at $0.19 (-98%). Peak market cap exceeded $2 billion, covering over 40 blockchains, pioneering multi-chain DeFi deployment. Now, daily trading volume is only $27 million, a fraction of Uniswap’s. Unlimited token supply, ongoing inflation, coupled with governance disputes and core team controversies, have made market trust hard to rebuild. The product is still iterating, but it has lost dominance in every sector. Still alive, but no longer the focus.
$DYDX
Leading derivatives platform, all-time high $26.83, current price $0.09 (-99.3%). Total trading volume surpassing $1.6 trillion, with substantial protocol revenue, and strong product capabilities. But the token is highly concentrated—93% held by the top three addresses, with the largest single address holding 73%. Continuous unlocking has expanded circulating supply, and new competitors like Hyperliquid have diverted many users. The product can perform, but no one dares to hold the token.
The protocol is not dead, but the token is gone. All three have collectively lost focus on value capture, with tokens becoming exit channels for early investors, each dropping over 97%, becoming casualties of the valuation logic shift in mature DeFi.