The current status of DEX from the data: transaction volume increased by 100% year-on-year, and the weekly transaction volume reached 17 billion US dollars. Is everything getting better again?

Author: OurNetwork

Compiled by: TechFlow

DEXs

Uniswap | PancakeSwap | Raydium | Let's F***ing Joe (Trader Joe)

The Barto | Dashboard

DEX trading volume increased 100% year-on-year; weekly trading volume reached $17 billion

• While decentralized exchange (DEX) trading volume has declined since its peak in 2024, it still hovers between approximately $20 billion and $25 billion per week, a 100% increase compared to last year. Solana and Base contributed significantly to transaction volume, with Solana’s transaction volume growing more than 20x, from $170 million to $4 billion. The only blockchain to see a decrease was Ethereum, with weekly transaction volume down around 20%.

Artemis

• DEX trading is more intense than a year ago, when Ethereum accounted for nearly 60% of market volume. There are currently five blockchains with market transaction shares exceeding 10%. Ethereum remains the largest blockchain with 29%. Base achieved significant market share growth during 2024 and now accounts for over 12% of DEX trading volume across all chains.

Artemis

• The trading venue has also undergone significant changes. Uniswap’s transaction share dropped to 33%, compared to 53% previously. Meanwhile, established DEXs like Solana-based Orca have increased market share, while new exchange Aerodrome has also grown in popularity.

DeFiLlama

Uniswap

Uniswap generated $26.4 billion in fees in the past year

• One of the most attractive features of Uniswap is that it allows liquidity providers — users who provide assets to traders — to earn income. The chart below shows the fees generated by V3 pools over the past 12 months. USDC-WETH performed best, generating over $4 billion in revenue for liquidity providers (LPs). Uniswap V3 offers multiple rates to charge traders — 0.01%, 0.05%, 0.3%, and 1% — to provide flexibility to LPs and traders — similar assets, such as stablecoins, typically charge lower fees. These tiered fees allow LPs to optimize returns based on the volatility and trading activity of the asset.

Coin Metrics

• Among Uniswap V2 liquidity pools, the WETH-USDT pool performed best in terms of fees collected, exceeding $1 billion, followed by USDC-WETH and PEPE-WETH trading pairs. Despite the simplicity of V2, V3's centralized liquidity feature has attracted greater trading volume due to its greater capital efficiency and lower fees.

Coin Metrics

• While Uniswap generates significant revenue for liquidity providers (LPs), $UNI is only a governance token and lacks mechanisms like token burns that could boost its value. 60% of UNI was allocated to the community in 2021. This $UNI HOLD Wave chart shows some interesting trends.

Coin Metrics

• Transaction highlights: This transaction shows the transfer of 500,000 $UNI (about $3.5 million) from Uniswap's timelock contract as part of its distribution mechanism. This system ensures that tokens are distributed gradually, aligned with long-term interests, and provides transparency. Analyzing these transfers can provide insights into distribution progress, potential market impact, internal behavior, possible changes in governance power, and the health of the protocol.

Pancakeswap

Seb | Website | Dashboard

PancakeSwap’s $CAKE supply drops by 7.8 million after one year

• PancakeSwap is a decentralized exchange that originated on BSC and now operates on multiple blockchains - the DEX issues $CAKE tokens as rewards given to liquidity providers (LPs). In 2023, PancakeSwap adopted a deflationary model to optimize its token economics. This was achieved through a mechanism of reducing issuance and recycling $CAKE from the market. Their efforts quickly paid off, as CAKE supply peaked at 391.3 million in August 2023. Since then, the supply has steadily decreased, reducing by 7.8 million tokens over the past year.

X - Cause

• To achieve this deflationary goal, PancakeSwap performs token destruction every week by sending CAKE to a destruction wallet on the BNB chain. According to their token economic model, an average of 9 million CAKE is destroyed per week. The reduction in issuance and market recycling offsets the minting volume.

X - @Sebabesse

• Deflation is driven by market factors such as transaction volume and CAKE price. Over time, the deflation rate varies between 1.4 CAKE and 0.2 CAKE per block. Based on current token economics, weekly supply reduction requires 275K CAKE to be recovered from the market. This goal is achieved almost every week.

X - @Sebabesse

• Trading Highlights: Tokens are burned every Monday in the team wallet. Monitoring these transactions is all you need to track CAKE supply.

Raydium

0xINFRA | Website | Dashboard

Raydium buybacks exceed $35 million since January 1

• Raydium is Solana’s leading decentralized exchange (DEX) by market share and liquidity pool creation. Since January 1, 2024, over $35 million in protocol fees have been allocated for automatic buybacks of $RAY tokens. Raydium has accounted for an average of 30% to 50% of cumulative spot market volume on Solana over the course of the year. Since inception, Raydium has enabled nearly $270 billion in volume, with liquidity providers (LPs) earning over $630 million in trading fees.

Top Ledger

• Taking real trading volume into account after removing trading bots, Raydium’s exchange routing program performs well and currently accounts for more than 30% of all real trading flow, second only to Jupiter.

Dune - @ilemi

• Despite being one of the main beneficiaries of the booming meme token trading volume on Solana, only 11.4% of Raydium’s total trading volume currently comes from meme tokens.

Top Ledger

• Trading Highlights: Raydium benefits from a rich ecosystem of third-party applications and protocols that use its core liquidity pool and trading infrastructure. The most beneficial is Pump.Fun, which migrated its liquidity pool to Raydium after completing the initial bonding curve. Other teams leveraging Raydium infrastructure include, but are not limited to, the following: Dexscreen's MoonShot, Trojan, BananaGun, FluxBot, BonkBot, Photon, and BullX.

LFJ

Blue | Website

LFJ reaches $130 billion in cumulative trading volume and surpasses $5 million in revenue by 2024

• LFJ (formerly Trader Joe's) is a blockchain token marketplace that launched in July 2021 and has facilitated more than $130 billion in cumulative trading volume since then. In 2024, LFJ added more than $30 billion in trading volume, doubling last year's volume. This growth was driven primarily by increased trading activity on the Avalanche network, where LFJ holds a dominant position.

DeFiLlama

• LFJ distributes 5%-25% of transaction fees to $JOE token stakers and will issue an average of $550,000 in stablecoins per month in 2024, which is a 109% increase from last year. Because 80% of revenue comes from Avalanche, increased on-chain activity brings significant value to JOE stakers.

Token Terminal

• $JOE tokens have reached their 500 million issuance cap, with approximately 380 million currently in circulation. JOE is rarely used as a liquidity reward due to the lack of a fixed reward program. To date, less than $100,000 has been distributed to yield farmers, while maintaining a positive yield of over $5 million.

Token Terminal