July's Trending Crypto Tokens

While many tokens have trailed Bitcoin in 2025, overshadowed by buzzy new crypto treasury startups, the broader altcoin market has been mounting a comeback since mid-June.

DeFi protocols are expanding their offerings, mobile-first crypto is heating up, and battle-tested primitives are being forced to prove their worth! Whether you’re hunting the next moonshot or dodging the next rug, these five tokens are worth paying attention to in the month ahead.

Today we dive into the biggest winners, the hardest losers, and the wild catalysts behind this month’s most explosive altcoin stories. 👇

🏦 Derive

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30-Day Change: +110%
Ticker: DRV

About:

Formerly known as Lyra Finance, Derive’s impeccable three-year track record has established it as the leading onchain crypto options protocols. Derive offers options markets for BTC and ETH with daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly expirations, in addition to high-leverage perpetual futures for many of crypto’s most popular majors and altcoins.

While the added complexity of transacting onchain and longer transaction times relative to centralized alternatives leaves Derive playing second fiddle against centralized titans, like Deribit and Binance, this platform remains a quality alternative for traders seeking a no-KYC, onchain experience.

Derive’s recent “Pro” provided traders with a customizable interface and reduced margin requirements by up to 60% for common multi-leg options strategies with defined risk, such as spreads and butterflies.

Token Catalysts:

• Pro Upgrade: By reducing margin requirements via Pro, Derive has increased users’ capital efficiency, increasing the amount of options they can purchase and thus improving the platform’s fee generational capabilities.
• CLOB Upgrade: Alongside the usage upgrades in its Pro package, Derive is committed to improving its trader experience with faster order book speeds. A recent Derive promotional video promises 20M transactions per second with 1 millisecond latency.
• Declining Usage: While DRV token price has been pumping over the past month, key usage statistics fail to justify the ascent. Total value locked has remained stagnant around $100M since February, with notable declines observed across trading volumes and platform fees during that period.

🏦 Euler

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30-Day Change: +81%
Ticker: EUL

About:

Euler brands itself as a flexible platform for decentralized lending and borrowing that is designed to adapt and grow with the evolving world of DeFi. Its EUL has steadily climbed throughout 2025, and the token just experienced its best two-week period on record, parabolically doubling in price to achieve new all-time highs north of $14!

This lending dApp allows for permissionless market creation with custom risk parameters. Additionally, Euler provides highly flexible collateralization options, which enable vault curators to accept multiple assets as collateral for a single market or accept rehypothecated deposits from other lending vaults as collateral, enhancing capital efficiency and reducing market fragmentation.

In late May, Euler introduced EulerSwap, a “smarter DEX” that integrated Euler lending vaults with Uniswap V4 via hooks to tackle inefficiencies like idle capital, lack of collateral utility, and costly rebalancing. This deployment empowers Euler depositors to natively borrow against their LP stakes while they earn yield from swaps and lending.

Token Catalysts:

• EulerSwap Integration: Capital-efficient AMM designs that integrate with lending markets have been one of the latest crazes in DeFi. Thanks to its EulerSwap deployment, Euler now presents an attractive offering in this sector.
• Rapid Growth: Euler has grown at a breakneck pace throughout 2025. On a year-to-date basis, Euler total value locked has increased by 10x, with the application managing to break above $1B just last month.

🐧 Pudgy Penguins

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30-Day Change: +41%
Ticker: PENGU

About:

The Bankless Analyst Team initiated bullish coverage on PENGU in May, viewing the token as positioned for further upside ahead of the rumored launch of a Pudgy Penguin mobile game. Our outlook was reaffirmed by a then-recent Apple App Store legal defeat, which could provide novel utility for PENGU in the form of in-game payments.

Pudgy Penguins is one of the only crypto brands to have successfully monetized its IP through a collection of digital content and physical merchandise. In December 2024, the NFT project airdropped PENGU tokens to community members and aligned blockchain users.

Deployed to Solana, PENGU is the official token of the Pudgy Penguin ecosystem; according to token lore, holders “become a beacon of memetic culture, a spreader of good vibes, and an active participant in [Pudgy Penguin’s] remarkable underdog story.”

Token Catalysts:

• Game Launch: Last year, Pudgy Penguins and NFL Rivals creator Mythical Games announced a partnership to develop a mobile game, which is expected to launch sometime in 2025. PENGU may very well be utilized as an in-game currency considering Apple's recent legal defeat, which cleared the way for App Store developers to utilize external payment rails.
• ETF, Maybe: Canary Capital has a pending application with the SEC to publicly list the “PENGU Canary ETF,” which would hold PENGU and Pudgy Penguin NFTs; its approval may result in PENGU buy pressure.

🌊 Hyperliquid

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30-Day Change: +5%
Ticker: HYPE

About:

Mobile-first trading experiences were all the rage at EthCC in Cannes last month, and Hyperliquid bulls are optimistic their exchange could service the mania on the news that wallet provider Phantom will integrate Hyperliquid.

This integration will allow Phantom users to access over 100 markets with up to 40x leverage directly from their wallets, dramatically lowering the barrier to entry for mobile-native crypto traders. In just a few taps, users will be able to trade seamlessly, with no need for separate dApp connections or wallet services.

While Hyperliquid’s underlying blockchain offers nothing special from a technical perspective, bulls tout the HyperEVM’s general purpose capabilities as a notable distinction that sets it apart from competitive onchain exchanges.

Token Catalysts:

• Perpetual Integrations: Phantom’s Hyperliquid integration may be only the first of many. Hyperliquid “builder codes” allow third parties to design their own interfaces and seamlessly act as intermediaries to fill their users’ orders on Hyperliquid markets.
• Highly Centralized: Although Hyperliquid has 16 distinct validators, they must be approved by the Hyperliquid Foundation. The network’s closely held nature could make it easier for regulators to crack down on its policy of compliance avoidance.
• Risky Markets: Hyperliquid’s liquidity provider vaults have previously suffered losses related to sudden price changes; the network has chosen to respond to these losses in multiple ways, including by nullifying profitable trades.

🔮 UMA

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30-Day Change: -34%
Ticker: UMA

About:

UMA Protocol’s core product is an “optimistic oracle” and dispute arbitration system that is designed to record verifiable truths onto the blockchain. UMA oracles provide verified onchain data for projects including Across, Polymarket, oSnap, Y2K and Index.

The UMA token is utilized during the oracle dispute process to provide an economic incentive to incentivize participants to cast the correct vote and uphold the trust, as incorrect asserters who attempt to resolve an oracle will have their proposal bonds forfeited to the winning majority of voters.

In addition to its optimistic oracles, UMA has also designed Oval. This cryptoeconomic primitive is designed to capture value leaked by lending markets during the liquidation process by forcing liquidators to pay for the privilege of conducting profitable liquidation.

Token Catalysts:

• Waning Trust: UMA Protocol has come under fire for its alleged mishandlings of multiple Polymarket prediction markets. Most recently, the Protocol found itself embroiled in controversy after UMA governance participants disputed a “yes” resolution to the question of whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy donned a suit during the June 24 NATO summit.
• Prediction Market Popularity: In June, prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi both scored billion dollar valuations in fresh raises from venture capitalists. While UMA’s dispute resolution process may be imperfect, this protocol remains an important primitive for decentralized truth settlement. The potential utilities of this technology expands well beyond prediction markets.