Written by: Nan Zhi, Odaily Planet Daily
Recently, in the rising market led by Bitcoin, besides the 'old altcoin' sector, DeFi project tokens have also performed remarkably. Taking CRV (Curve) as an example, it has risen from 0.2 USDT to a peak of 1.24 USDT in the past month, an increase of over 500%. According to Token Terminal data, Curve Finance's annualized revenue in the past 30 days is close to 37 million USD, with a month-on-month growth of nearly 23%.
The common feature of these types of tokens is that they have been circulating for many years, with a low proportion of unlocked tokens, and the sustainability of protocol revenue has also been verified over time. Besides CRV, which other types of tokens meet these characteristics? Odaily will conduct a statistical analysis in this article.
Basic situation explanation
This data is based on DefiLlama and CoinGecko, among which:
Project selection: Top 60 projects by revenue in the last 24 hours from DefiLlama;
Data selection: Protocol's 24-hour revenue and 30-day revenue (DefiLlama), protocol token circulating market cap and FDV (CoinGecko)
Other situations: There are special cases where the protocol has not issued tokens, is about to issue tokens, or has mixed-use tokens across multiple protocols, which are verified by the author through other materials.
Due to the excessive amount of data, no graphical display is provided. The complete data for the 60 projects can be found at the link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1He_Ms6NZ434Qt7lMC6ozGC71kszdVC_P_L6lDUKY5OI/edit?usp=sharing
Top 20 projects by revenue
The top 20 projects are shown in the image below, where we can observe several points:
The top revenue projects are mainly divided into three categories: network (chains), DeFi, and Meme tools;
Most tokens have been unlocked for over half, with only JTO (Jito) and ETHFI (ether.fi) having a relatively low unlocking ratio;
Meme tools have not issued tokens and account for 20% of the top 20, among which Pump, Photon, and BullX generate revenue from transaction fees and are all on the Solana chain. DEX Screener mainly generates advertising revenue from Meme tokens;
Only two projects have a 30-day total revenue to circulating market cap ratio exceeding three digits, namely Jito and Raydium, both on the Solana chain;
(Note: The project ranked tenth is Uniswap Labs, and the second is the Uniswap protocol itself.)
Which has the highest cost-effectiveness?
Excluding projects that have not issued tokens, the following table ranks them in descending order based on the 30-day total revenue to circulating market cap ratio.
Among the relatively niche projects, the top-ranked is Gamma and the fifth is WigoSwap. Gamma is a liquidity management protocol on ZKsync, which has maintained stable protocol revenue over time, with monthly income around 1 million to 4 million USD. Token stakers are entitled to receive a share of the Gamma treasury income.
WigoSwap is the original DeFi Hub on Fantom, which will be renamed DeFive as Fantom transitions to Sonic. The protocol's business will also expand into multiple fields such as Swap, task platforms (similar to Galaxy), asset trading markets, games, etc.
WigoSwap's revenue has just started to grow recently, and its sustainability is currently unclear, but it is worth paying attention to with the arrival of Sonic.
Regarding token use cases, according to official documents, WIGO is only used as a circulating token within the ecosystem, and there are no indications regarding profit rights.
Other protocols are well-known products (LFJ was originally Trader Joe), and will not be elaborated here. Focus can be placed on their data marginal turning points. The 30-day total revenue to FDV is as follows.
Is there a chance for projects that have not issued tokens?
The projects ranked in the top 60 by revenue that have not issued tokens are shown in the image below. It can be seen that the vast majority are Meme tools, with a low probability of token issuance. Currently, only Pump and OpenSea have a relatively high probability of issuing tokens, but both have very low cost-effectiveness in terms of active volume boosting. Readers are advised to look for opportunities outside the table.
