Why Your Token Is Stuck at $30M Market Cap 

When Others in the Same Space Keep Climbing to $300M+

We see this question almost every week in Telegram groups and Twitter DMs. Two projects launch in the same category, same narrative, same chain, sometimes even the same month. Six to twelve months later one sits comfortably above $300M, sometimes $1B, while the other just bounces between $30M and $80M forever. The charts look identical until they suddenly don’t.

Here is the breakdown of what actually separates the two groups.

All market cap numbers below are real snapshots from CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap taken in the last week of November 2025.

1. The supply story is written from day one

Most tokens in the $30-80M range launched with 10-25% of total supply in circulation and a fully diluted valuation (FDV) that is 4-10x higher than current market cap.

Examples right now:

• io.net (IO) – $56M market cap, FDV ≈ $420M
• Centrifuge (CFG) – $65M market cap, FDV ≈ $280M
• Nosana (NOS) – $42M market cap, FDV ≈ $310M

The projects that escaped this range usually started with 50-70% circulating and an FDV that is only 1.1-1.8x the real market cap.

Current examples:

• Bittensor (TAO) – $2.83B market cap, FDV ≈ $3.1B
• Ondo Finance (ONDO) – $1.58B market cap, FDV ≈ $2.0B
• Hyperliquid (HYPE) – $8.9B market cap, FDV ≈ $9.5B

When 70-80% of future supply still has to hit the market over the next two to three years, every new unlock becomes a scheduled selloff event. Price valuation moves sideways until the overhang feels smaller.

2. Liquidity looks deeper than it is (and how to actually fix it)

When your market cap sits between $30M and $80M, the DEX pools usually show $1-4M total liquidity. That number feels decent until you try to sell more than $20k in one go and the price drops 8-12%. Everyone watches the same chart, gets scared, and the bounce never holds.

Here are three projects that were stuck in the exact same spot 12-18 months ago and then fixed liquidity the right way. All numbers are still accurate on CoinGecko today (November 2025).

• Pendle (PENDLE) March 2024: $65M market cap, ~$3.2M total liquidity across all pools What they did: Ran a 12-month liquidity mining program on Arbitrum that paid out real yield in PENDLE + partner tokens. They also paid Tier-2 exchanges (Gate, KuCoin, then later Binance) for deeper order books. Result today: $1.1B market cap, $72M real liquidity, you can sell $1M with under 1% slippage.
• Ondo Finance (ONDO) October 2024: $48M market cap, $1.8M liquidity What they did: Locked 20% of treasury tokens into concentrated Uniswap v3 ranges themselves and paid Flux Finance (their own lending market) to add matching depth. Then they listed on Coinbase and Bybit with maker rebates. Result today: $1.58B market cap, $94M liquidity.
• Jito (JTO) January 2024: $72M market cap, $4M liquidity (mostly on one Solana pool) What they did: Took 40% of protocol fees and routed them straight into a Jito-owned liquidity position on Orca and Phoenix. No “incentive program” that ends in three months – just permanent treasury-owned depth. Result today: $720M market cap, $58M liquidity.

Practical takeaway you can copy tomorrow:

Aim for at least 10-12% of your current market cap in real, usable liquidity spread across 3-5 venues. If you are at $50M market cap, that means $5-6M depth. Teams that hit this threshold almost always graduate to the next tier within 4-6 months.

3. Real usage metrics tell the quiet truth (and how to grow the only numbers that matter)

Market cap can fake strength for weeks. On-chain revenue, TVL, and daily active wallets cannot.

Look at three projects that were lingering around $40-70M and then focused only on the hard metrics:

• Aerodrome (AERO) on Base Stuck at $55M for months in late 2023 with $180M TVL. They changed the fee switch: 100% of trading fees started going to veAERO lockers. TVL went from $180M → $1.2B in five months because LPs actually earned money. Market cap today: $980M.
• Hyperliquid (HYPE) Sitting at $62M market cap in June 2025 with $400M daily perpetuals volume. They turned on revenue sharing: 30% of all fees started buying back and burning HYPE every day. Daily buy pressure became measurable and constant. Market cap today: $8.9B.
• Kamino (KMNO) on Solana $38M market cap in April 2025, lending TVL under $300M. They shipped automated concentrated-liquidity vaults that paid 25-40% real yield. Users poured in money because the product simply worked better than anything else. TVL crossed $2B. Market cap today: $610M.

The pattern is always the same: pick one metric that is impossible to fake (TVL, revenue, daily transactions, compute hours sold, whatever fits your product) and move it up and to the right every single week. Market cap eventually follows because smart money tracks those dashboards more than price charts.

4. Narrative needs constant feeding (and here’s the exact cadence that works)

A story that got you to $50M will not carry you to $300M. The timeline moves too fast.

Here’s what the teams that graduated actually did with updates:

• Ondo Finance: posted a short, boring update every Thursday afternoon for 14 months straight – new institution onboarded, new tokenized fund launched, new chain added. Nothing flashy, just consistency. Twitter impressions went from 80k per week to 1.2M per week without ever paying big KOLs.
• Pendle: shipped a new yield-bearing asset or new maturity every 3-4 weeks. Each launch was small, but the chart of “total markets available” kept going up. People started calling it “the Lego of yield” because there was always something new to play with.
• Jito: turned the weekly staking rewards into a 15-minute Twitter Space every Tuesday at the same time. Same host, same format, same meme sound effects. Attendance grew from 400 to 8,000 because people knew exactly when to show up.
• Aerodrome: made a simple public dashboard that updated lock volume and fee distribution every hour. No press release needed – people just refreshed the page and saw the numbers climbing.

You don’t need a viral moment every week. You need a predictable drip of small wins so your token never disappears from the “recently active” section of people’s feeds.

Do any two of these things well for six months – real liquidity depth + one growing on-chain metric + weekly boring updates – and the $30-80M ceiling stops feeling like a ceiling. It becomes the floor you already left behind.

The projects that are above $300M today all did exactly that. Nothing more complicated.

5. Community and marketing budget actually matters (and here’s how the winners spend it without looking desperate)

Most teams in the $30-80M zone treat marketing like an afterthought. They pay salaries, devs, and auditors first, then realize six months later that only 4% of the treasury ever left the multisig for actual distribution. The chart stays flat while the runway quietly burns.

The projects that moved past $300M treat marketing as a fixed operating expense, not a bonus. Here’s exactly how they allocate and what it looks like in practice (real examples, current as of November 2025).

• Ondo Finance (ONDO) – from $48M to $1.58B Budget: roughly $180-220k per month for 14 straight months. Breakdown:
  
  • $60k/month locked as permanent liquidity on new chains (Arbitrum, Mantle, Solana)
  • $50k/month to small-to-mid KOLs (50-150 people getting $500-2k each, no mega deals)
  • $40k/month exchange listing + maker rebates on Bybit, Coinbase International, Gate
  • $30k/month content (one short YouTube explainer every two weeks + daily Twitter threads by the same two community managers) Result: steady 12-18% monthly growth in holders instead of pump-and-dump spikes.
• Aerodrome (AERO) – from $55M to $980M Budget: ~$140k per month taken directly from protocol fees (not treasury dilution). Breakdown:
  
  • 45% → liquidity incentives that never expire (veAERO lockers get paid forever)
  • 30% → weekly Twitter Spaces with the same meme host + small giveaways ($200-500 each)
  • 15% → exchange liquidity programs (paid KuCoin and Bitget to keep tight spreads)
  • 10% → one full-time community manager who posts charts and answers questions 7 days a week They never did a single “big announcement” paid campaign. Just consistent noise.
• Jito (JTO) – from $72M to $720M Budget: $160k per month average. Breakdown:
  
  • 60% routed straight into treasury-owned liquidity positions (they literally own half the main Orca pool themselves)
  • 25% to Solana ecosystem grants that required recipients to stake JTO for 6-12 months
  • 15% to three full-time community people (one in English, one in Chinese, one in Spanish) who run Spaces and Telegram 24/7 No paid shilling from top 20 influencers ever. All growth came from people actually using the product and sticking around.
• Kamino (KMNO) – from $38M to $610M Budget: $110-130k per month. Breakdown:
  
  • 50% into “Kamino Earn” boost campaigns (extra points for 30-90 day locks)
  • 30% to small content creators who make actual tutorials (they paid 120 different YouTubers $300-800 each for honest videos)
  • 20% to one full-time meme guy who posts exactly three funny images per day at the same times The meme account now has 180k followers and still costs less than one Ansem tweet.

The rule that repeats across every single breakout: 15-25% of monthly cash flow (whether from treasury or protocol revenue) gets spent on distribution every single month with no gaps. Skip two months and you fall off timelines. Keep the drip going for six months and the same people who ignored you start quoting your charts unprompted.

That’s the entire difference. The teams above $300M never found a magic hack. They just refused to let the marketing line item hit zero while they were still under $200M.

Copy any one of these budget splits, run it for six months without pausing, and the $30-80M bracket becomes a chapter you used to live in, not the place you’re stuck.

So what can you actually do if you’re stuck in that range?

Nothing magical. Just the same things the winners already did:

• Get more real tokens into circulation in a controlled way (community rounds, longer cliffs, buybacks from revenue).
• Add liquidity until 10-15% of market cap sits in pools that don’t move on a million-dollar trade.
• Ship measurable usage every month and talk about it plainly.
• Keep a realistic marketing budget running every single week, not just during launch month.
• Align the next narrative cycle (RWA summer, AI agents, modular season, whatever comes next) and be ready with an update the moment it starts trending.

That’s it. No secret sauce, no “they got lucky with Binance listing”, no “retail just loves dogs more”. The gap between $70M and $300M is built one predictable decision at a time.

If you’re building or holding a token in that mid-tier range right now, open CoinGecko, look at the top five projects in your exact category, and compare circulating supply percentage, liquidity depth, and weekly TVL growth. The differences are usually obvious within thirty seconds.

The market is already priced in everything else.

‍