1kx Blockchain Industry In-Depth Report: Who is Really Making Money?

Author: 1kx Capital Research Team

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Guide: After experiencing the peak of a frenzied bull market from 2024 to 2025, the blockchain industry is undergoing a profound value reconstruction. The renowned European crypto investment firm 1kx Capital has conducted a comprehensive review of real financial data covering over 2,600 on-chain protocols and more than 100 publicly listed companies. Despite a 28% year-on-year decline in total on-chain revenue due to falling cryptocurrency prices, the industry's total annual revenue is still expected to firmly hold above the $100 billion mark.

A more fundamental structural breakthrough is quietly occurring beneath the surface: the revenue share from real-world asset tokenization (RWA), prediction markets, crypto payment cards, and institutional on-chain businesses is expected to surge to 30% of the entire industry by 2026, surpassing the total revenue of blockchain's underlying infrastructure for the first time in history in the third quarter. The on-chain economy is accelerating its escape from a singular reliance on purely speculative gas fees.

In terms of capital market pricing, the industry has welcomed a milestone logical disruption: implementing real value distribution (dividends and buybacks) to token holders has become the only core alpha that can outperform Bitcoin in 2026, with the dividend token index achieving an 82% profit this year against the trend. As the valuation of application layer protocols gradually aligns with the price-to-sales ratios of traditional listed companies, blockchain is completing a critical rite of passage from bubble frenzy to cash flow maturity.

Total revenue of the blockchain industry, core driving factors and revenue sources, trends in segmented tracks, and far-reaching implications for asset valuation.

Key Points

The total revenue of the entire blockchain industry has decreased by 28% year-on-year, which is in line with the overall 30% decline in the cryptocurrency secondary market. However, total revenue for 2026 is still expected to steadily approach approximately $100 billion.

In stark contrast to the overall market's pullback, revenue from institutional adoption and real-world economic use cases is expected to rise against the trend to 30% of the total industry by 2026; in the third quarter, revenue from real-world economic use cases surpassed the revenue from blockchain's underlying infrastructure for the first time in history.

Publicly listed companies currently capture 16% of the blockchain industry's revenue, significantly higher than 7% in 2022; the concentration of industry revenue is extremely high, but for on-chain protocols, the leading revenue positions among various tracks remain in dynamic rotation.

Implementing dividends for token holders has become the core storyline for secondary market rewards in 2026: the dividend token index has achieved an excess return of 82% year-to-date. The valuation multiples of application layer protocols that implement dividends have now aligned with those of traditional listed companies, while public chain infrastructure still maintains a very high market fee rate premium.

As the aforementioned structural trends continue, industry revenue is expected to gradually recover; three core themes worth closely tracking in the future include: the increasing prominence of on-chain data value, the potential uncertainties brought by artificial intelligence to on-chain revenue, and the deep integration and evolution of token and traditional equity characteristics.

Figure: Annual total revenue trends in the blockchain industry and the $100 billion scale forecast for 2026.

Figure: The proportion of revenue from institutional adoption and real-world economic relevance has surged to 30%.

Figure: The dividend token index significantly outperformed Bitcoin and mainstream asset performance.

Frenzy, Maturity, and Broader Adoption

In our 2025 industry revenue report "From Frenzy to Maturity," we pointed out that the drastic reduction in underlying transaction costs allows upper-layer applications to expand user payment scales through economies of scale, while the proportion of underlying public chains in the total industry revenue continues to shrink.

Entering 2026, although the total industry revenue has retreated due to falling cryptocurrency prices, these two deep trends continue to evolve steadily.

Beneath the surface of the industry's revenue withdrawal, a historic reorganization of revenue composition is taking place: traditional institutional adoption and broader real-world economic use cases together created 30% of the total industry revenue in 2026.

Among them, institutional clients and institutional token holders contributed 12% of the share, while tokenized real-world assets (RWA), crypto payments, and prediction markets contributed a total of 18%. In the third quarter of 2026, the revenue from the latter surpassed the overall revenue of public chain infrastructure for the first time in history.

Real business adoption is highly concentrated in blue ocean areas where traditional financial structures cannot meet needs (such as 24/7 tokenized US stock trading and pre-IPO price discovery), as well as traditional industries where intermediary fees can easily be compressed by technology (such as card settlement networks and traditional gambling).

Meanwhile, traditional publicly listed companies are fully deepening their strategic embedding in the blockchain ecosystem, with their captured share of industry revenue steadily climbing to 16% in 2026.

Historical Relationship Between Total Blockchain Revenue and Bitcoin Price Trends

This report systematically integrates real-time operational data from over 2,600 on-chain protocols across the network and financial disclosures from more than 100 publicly listed companies, as well as detailed survey data on non-listed private entities, up to the third quarter of 2026.

The report aims to provide a panoramic view of the global blockchain economic landscape: deeply analyzing its growth drivers and revenue sources, assessing the frontier evolution of various segmented tracks, and exploring the profound reshaping of digital asset valuation systems.

What is Blockchain Revenue and How Large is Its Real Volume?

Figure: The connotation definition, accounting scope, and global scale overview of blockchain industry revenue.

Affected by the overall 30% decline in the cryptocurrency secondary market, the total revenue of the blockchain industry is expected to decline by 28% year-on-year in 2026, but the total annual revenue is still expected to firmly stand at around $100 billion.

Total Annual Revenue of the Entire Industry Expected to Reach $100 Billion

In 2025, the total revenue of the blockchain industry soared to approximately $140 billion, nearing the record set during the historical bull market peak in 2021. The vast majority of the industry's revenue remains highly anchored to fluctuations in the secondary market prices of crypto assets.

The total revenue of the blockchain industry is expected to decline by 28% year-on-year in 2026, which is basically in line with the decline in the average price of Bitcoin. Relative to the total market capitalization of the crypto market, the industry's total revenue has actually remained flat on a year-on-year basis.

Based on the annualized projections from the cumulative operational data of the first three quarters of 2026, the total revenue of the entire industry is expected to steadily reach approximately $100 billion in 2026.

Composition of Blockchain Revenue: About 50-60% from User Payment Fees, 40-50% from Other Revenues

Looking back at the historical evolution since 2021, the overall revenue of the blockchain industry mainly converges on three core sources:

The first category is transaction fees directly paid by on-chain users, such as decentralized token exchange fees on Uniswap, which are publicly transparent and can be captured in real-time through on-chain data.

The second category is service fees paid by off-chain users, such as trading commissions charged by centralized exchanges like Binance, which cannot be directly inferred from on-chain transaction flows.

The third category includes other derivative revenues, such as Bitcoin PoW mining outputs (essentially indirectly paid through inflation dilution to token holders) or interest income earned by institutions like Circle through the allocation of stablecoin reserves to US Treasury bonds. Most of this can be estimated based on the scale of on-chain assets.

In recent years, the distribution ratio between user direct payments and derivative revenues has remained relatively stable. However, there is a fundamental distinction between the two: derivative revenues are primarily highly dependent on the prices in the secondary market of assets (with nearly half being mining and staking rewards) and the external traditional macro interest rate environment.

DeFi and Finance Dominate, Blockchain Infrastructure Revenue Share Gradually Declines

Figure: The revenue share of DeFi and finance tracks continues to expand while the share of blockchain infrastructure declines.

Since 2022, the revenue share of DeFi and broadly defined financial services has continued to rise across the industry, officially reaching an absolute dominant position of two-thirds in 2026.

In contrast, the revenue share of public chain infrastructure has been continuously shrinking. With the widespread adoption of Ethereum L2 scaling and high-performance public chains, the absolute transaction fees paid directly on the underlying chains have significantly decreased since the peak in 2021.

Segmented Revenue Distribution: DeFi and Finance Account for 66%, Infrastructure for 22%

In 2026, DeFi and finance tracks collectively generated approximately $65 billion in revenue, most of which was driven by off-chain user payments.

Of this $65 billion, centralized exchanges and derivatives trading platforms contributed 42%, asset management and ETF-related services accounted for 7%, prediction markets made up 6%, on-chain user payment fees contributed 13%, and other derivative revenues such as interest from stablecoin treasury reserves accounted for 29%.

The revenue from blockchain infrastructure was approximately $22 billion in 2026, falling to the lowest level since 2020. The actual fees paid by users for on-chain exchanges currently account for less than 3% of total industry revenue.

The remaining segmented tracks collectively generated approximately $12 billion in revenue, with consumer-grade applications being the largest segment, accounting for about 9%.

DeFi and Finance Down 16% Year-on-Year: Centralized Exchanges and On-Chain Fees Decline Most

Figure: Year-on-year changes in centralized exchanges and on-chain transaction fees, and declines in various segmented revenues.

In the DeFi and finance segments, overall revenue has declined by 16% year-on-year due to the contraction of liquidity in the secondary market, with significant differentiation across different business lines.

Off-chain user payments have overall declined by 18%, with the most significant drops occurring in traditional sectors sensitive to cryptocurrency prices: centralized exchange fees fell by 25% (accounting for about 65% of off-chain payments), asset management and custody fees dropped by 34%, brokerage services decreased by 34%, and ETF fee income fell by 20%.

However, revenue from centralized finance (CeFi) services aimed at institutions grew by 12% against the trend; the prediction market experienced explosive growth, with Kalshi and Polymarket's revenue in the first half of the year skyrocketing from less than $50 million to over $1.5 billion.

Overall, derivative income slightly decreased by 2%. Interest from treasury reserves held by stablecoin issuers like Tether and Circle grew by 10%; however, rewards for miners, on-chain asset management, and staking service providers fell by 9%.

On-chain user payments overall dropped by 31%. Among these, DEX (decentralized exchange) fees were halved year-on-year (down 50%); perpetual contract DEXs leveraging RWA (real-world assets) managed to increase their revenue by 14%; lending protocols remained flat in the first half but saw a year-on-year decline of 46% in the third quarter.

On-Chain Transaction Volume Continues to Rise, but Total Transaction Fees Halved Year-on-Year

Figure: The number of on-chain transactions reaches a new high while total fees drop significantly.

The revenue of the blockchain infrastructure industry has plummeted by 39% year-on-year, undergoing a fundamental disruption in its internal structure.

Due to the weakening of cryptocurrency prices, staking and PoW mining rewards have significantly decreased, currently accounting for about 90% of total infrastructure revenue (with Bitcoin block rewards making up nearly half).

At the same time, transaction fees on public chains have halved year-on-year. However, behind the halving of transaction fees, the total number of actual transactions on-chain is expected to set a historical record, with an 18% year-on-year increase.

The total monthly active user (MAU) count across the network remains stable at around 200 million, far exceeding the levels before the 2024 bull market, confirming the inevitable pattern outlined in our 2025 research report and the "trust cost theory": the cheaper and more efficient the underlying infrastructure, the more prosperous the upper-layer scalable applications can thrive.

Wallet Revenue Halved, Consumer Applications Flat, DePIN On-Chain Fees Rise but Overall Decline

Figure: Breakdown of revenue scale and growth rates for wallets, consumer applications, and the DePIN track.

In other ecological tracks, consumer application revenue remains stable overall. The largest category, online gambling and blockchain gaming, saw a slight increase of 8%, primarily driven by stable revenue from online crypto entertainment platforms like Stake.com.

Due to decreased retail trading enthusiasm and falling token prices, the built-in exchange fees on wallets and front-end interfaces plummeted by over 60%.

Decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) total revenue fell by 10% year-on-year. As governance token prices declined, the value of tokens distributed to hardware node operators shrank by about $100 million (a drop of 65%); however, it is noteworthy that the actual on-chain fees paid by end users doubled year-on-year, rising to $170 million.

What Are the Core Trends in the Evolution of Blockchain Industry Revenue?

Figure: Analysis of the core revenue structure changes and key driving forces in the blockchain industry.

In stark contrast to the overall revenue downturn in the industry, revenue deeply tied to institutional adoption and real-world use cases surged against the trend in 2026, rapidly rising to account for 30% of total industry revenue.

In the third quarter of 2026, revenue generated from real-world use cases surpassed the overall revenue of public chain infrastructure for the first time in history.

Institutional and Real-World Use Case Revenue Expected to Reach 30% in 2026

Traditional institutional business revenue has doubled over the past three years, surpassing $6 billion in the first half of 2026, accounting for 12% of total industry revenue.

Revenue from real-world use cases increased by 58% year-on-year, led by strong performance in prediction markets and RWA asset trading fees. In the third quarter, revenue from real-world use cases reached approximately $5.3 billion, officially surpassing the total revenue of blockchain infrastructure of about $5.1 billion during the same period.

Based on a comprehensive estimate with a seasonal share of 33% in the third quarter, revenue related to institutions and real-world economies will firmly occupy one-third of the industry’s total revenue in 2026.

Institutional Adoption Contributes Approximately $6 Billion to Industry Revenue in the First Half of 2026

Figure: Breakdown of institutional adoption's contribution to industry revenue in the first half of 2026.

In the first half of 2026, revenue from institutional-related businesses was $6.1 billion, a slight year-on-year decrease of $700 million, entirely due to the contraction of asset management scale and the cooling of staking returns caused by falling cryptocurrency prices.

Among these, institutional owners contributed $1.7 billion in revenue, showing a year-on-year increase of 10%. Although fintech brokerage revenue shrank by $400 million, traditional banks and Wall Street institutions saw their revenue increase by $200 million to $600 million (up from zero three years ago), with one-third coming from asset management giants' ETF management fees.

At the same time, dedicated blockchains for institutions (such as Canton, Robinhood Chain, Arc, Soneium, etc.) contributed approximately $350 million in revenue, marking a significant leap from zero to one.

At the institutional client level, $4.4 billion in revenue was contributed in the first half of the year. Asset management, custody, and staking service fees shrank by 34% due to falling cryptocurrency prices; however, institutions increased their share in centralized exchanges and derivatives trading by 10% against the trend.

For example, Coinbase generated $236 million in revenue from institutional trading in the first half of 2026, accounting for 9% of total revenue, with the proportion of institutional trading doubling year-on-year and increasing sixfold compared to the first half of 2023.

Driven by Prediction Markets and RWA Trading, Revenue from Real-World Use Cases Increased by 58% Year-on-Year

Figure: Explosive growth of revenue from real-world use cases driven by prediction markets and RWA trading.

In the first half of 2026, real-world use cases brought a staggering $2.9 billion in incremental revenue to the industry, primarily driven by:

The issuance of stablecoins and interest from treasury reserves contributed $250 million in incremental revenue; since the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates in 2022, treasury yield income has remained the strongest foundation in this sector.

On-chain issuance, lending, and trading fees based on tokenized real-world assets (RWA) contributed $1.1 billion in incremental funds.

Various practical utility tools contributed $1.6 billion in increments: among them, the prediction market experienced a historic explosion, with Kalshi and Polymarket contributing approximately $1.4 billion in fees in the first half of the year, expected to exceed $4 billion for the entire year.

Additionally, crypto credit card settlements, foreign trade financing, and cross-border payments contributed an incremental $200 million. A Boston Consulting Group (BCG) survey indicated that by 2025, about 60% of stablecoin transaction volumes will be directly linked to real-world commercial trade, with the total scale of on-chain commercial settlements reaching historical peaks.

RWA Perpetual Contract Trading Volume Increased by Over 100 Times Year-on-Year, Strongly Driving Transaction Fees

Figure: The trading volume of perpetual contracts for real-world assets (RWA) surged over 100 times and contributed to transaction fees.

RWA trading has shown extremely strong explosive power this year. By the third quarter of 2026, RWA contracts accounted for 18% of the total trading volume of all perpetual contracts on leading global derivatives exchanges.

In the asset structure distribution, tokenized US stocks accounted for 55% of contract trading volume (the previous year was dominated by gold), while crude oil perpetual contracts led the commodities sector.

Pre-IPO equity contracts for well-known unicorns like SpaceX have become the most dynamic new trading category. In just the first half of 2026, RWA-related derivatives trading contributed approximately $1 billion in fee revenue to various platforms.

The speed of bringing real assets on-chain is extremely rapid and has gained proactive acceptance from traditional finance and regulatory agencies. The trading volume of tokenized stocks on Robinhood's dedicated chain exceeded $13 billion in the third quarter, with over 70% of trading occurring during regular US stock market closing hours; the total spot trading volume across the network reached approximately $50 billion.

In response to the dimensional impact of all-weather on-chain trading, Nasdaq has officially announced that it will launch a continuous trading mechanism for five days a week, 23 hours a day starting in December; the SEC has initiated the first reform of the transfer agent system in 40 years based on tokenization; Coinbase is also actively applying to the SEC for a 24/7 perpetual contract license for stocks.

Prediction Market Fee Revenue Increased by 19 Times Year-on-Year

Figure: Prediction market protocol fee revenue achieved a 19-fold explosive year-on-year growth curve.

The prediction market exploded into mainstream view during the 2024 US presidential election and grew into a super track with a settlement scale of up to $55 billion in the third quarter of 2026.

In the current composition of transaction volume, sports events and entertainment incidents account for the vast majority, while contracts related to pure cryptocurrency asset prices have been diluted to less than 15%.

Despite the emergence of hundreds of new platforms in the industry, transaction volumes remain highly concentrated in the duopoly of Kalshi and Polymarket. Mainstream financial and internet giants are rapidly entering the market through external collaborations and strategic acquisitions.

Coinbase and Robinhood, through their distribution partnership with Kalshi, have earned approximately $200 million in market share from prediction markets in just the second quarter. Robinhood has developed Rothera, DraftKings has launched DKeX, Meta has introduced Arena, Interactive Brokers has launched ForecastEx, and Kraken has directly acquired the compliant derivatives exchange Bitnomial.

The prediction market fee revenue is expected to exceed $1 billion in the second quarter of 2026 and is projected to surpass $1.5 billion in the third quarter. As platforms continue to introduce high-win-rate parlay combinations and enterprise-level hedging products, market demand is experiencing exponential growth.

Total Spending on Crypto Payment Cards Triples Year-on-Year, Reaching $3.4 Billion in Q3

Image: Total spending on crypto payment cards surges threefold, breaking $3.4 billion quarterly record

In the first half of 2026, the global crypto payment sector, including card swipes, cross-border remittances, and fiat deposit and withdrawal channels, generated over $500 million in total revenue. Among these, the crypto credit card business has shown the most remarkable growth.

By the third quarter of 2026, the actual card spending by cardholders has tripled year-on-year, driving related settlement revenue to more than double compared to the previous year. On-chain payment fees have surged eightfold under the catalyst of an elevenfold increase in transaction volume; during this process, the overall fee rate has compressed by over 25%, highlighting the maturity and competitiveness of the market.

In the commercial ecosystem, the vast majority of card transaction flows rely on the Visa network for settlement, with Visa establishing its absolute dominance as the global standard through a light-asset strategy.

Competitor Mastercard, on the other hand, has invested as much as $1.8 billion this year to fully acquire the crypto payment gateway BVNK, thereby capturing approximately $30 billion in annual stablecoin processing volume and over 100 fiat settlement licenses worldwide.

This vertical integration across the entire industry chain enables Mastercard to deeply capture large-scale B2B cross-border trade settlement flows, securing a core position for its future fee-sharing battles in the era of native stablecoin settlement.

Who is Capturing These Revenues, and Who is the Ultimate Winner?

Image: Changes in blockchain revenue capture patterns and market share of industry leaders

The share of publicly listed companies in the overall blockchain revenue across the industry has expanded from 7% in 2022 to 16% in 2026.

Although the overall industry revenue exhibits a highly centralized characteristic with a concentration at the top, in the realm of decentralized protocols, the revenue leaders in various sub-sectors continue to experience intense cyclical reshuffling.

Share of Public Companies' Revenue Rises from 7% in 2022 to 16% in 2026

Image: Evolution of the share of listed companies in the overall blockchain revenue from 7% to 16%

An increasing number of publicly listed companies are generating substantial blockchain business revenues, driving a steady expansion of the listed company camp's share across the industry.

This leap is partly due to the endogenous scale growth of the core businesses of these companies and partly boosted by the wave of IPOs from heavyweight crypto unicorns (for example, Circle successfully listed on the US stock market in 2025).

The industry revenue exhibits a strong Matthew effect at the top: among the listed companies, the top six giants monopolize about 60% of the total revenue across the entire sector; while in the non-listed private sector, the concentration of the top few giants also exceeds 50%.

On the surface, the share of token issuance protocols in the total industry revenue has dropped to 26%, marking a historical low since 2020. However, after excluding the cooling of token sales and the significant reduction in public chain Gas fees, the capture ratio of on-chain protocols in direct user payments is actually at a historical peak.

What is Driving the Continuous Rise in Public Companies' Revenue Share?

Image: Analysis of the core catalysts driving the continuous increase in the share of blockchain revenue for public companies

The expansion of the revenue landscape for public companies is primarily driven by three pillars:

First, the clear tiered efforts of three major listed enterprises. The year 2025 saw the concentrated listing of 30 crypto companies, with Circle as the flagship leader (contributing $1.7 billion in revenue in 2025, expected to exceed $2.7 billion in 2026); although the traditional financial giants that entered the market in 2020 have a relatively low overall share (around 10%), they are the only tier to achieve absolute revenue growth; while in the tier that went public in 2021, Coinbase has consistently contributed 70% to 90% of the majority share.

Second, the endogenous growth of existing listed companies and aggressive mergers and acquisitions. The top ten listed companies have doubled their revenue over the past three years; at the same time, the giants have expanded their victories through active acquisitions: Mastercard acquired BVNK, S&P Global acquired OpenZeppelin, SBI acquired bitbank, Standard Chartered acquired Zodia Custody, and Circle merged with Axelar, among many other cases.

The third noteworthy hidden evolution is the direct holdings of underlying protocol tokens and ecological assets by top asset management firms on Wall Street.

Apollo Global Management acquired as many as 90 million MORPHO tokens and fully integrated its tokenized private equity fund with Morpho as collateral for lending; BlackRock made strategic investments in the Uniswap ecosystem and laid out UNI, while leveraging UniswapX to facilitate on-chain matching transactions for its BUIDL tokenized fund; BlackRock, Apollo, Standard Chartered, and SBI have also participated more deeply in the institutional pre-sale of Circle's exclusive chain Arc, which involved as many as 740 million tokens.

Industry Revenue is Highly Concentrated: The Top Six Entities Occupy Half of Each Subcategory

Image: The top six giants in the industry occupy 50% to 60% of each subcategory with high concentration

The revenue flow across the entire industry exhibits a high degree of concentration.

Among publicly listed companies, in addition to Coinbase and Circle collectively raking in about $3.3 billion in revenue, the remaining revenue is highly concentrated among three major industry groups:

First, the Bitcoin-listed mining companies with a scale of $2 billion. In the first half of 2026, the Bitcoin network distributed nearly $6 billion in block rewards, with listed mining companies claiming about one-third of that; second, traditional financial giants generating about $1.1 billion in revenue, including JPMorgan, BlackRock, CME Group, S&P Global, Visa, and Robinhood; third, listed exchanges and market makers generating $600 million in revenue, such as Bullish, Gemini, and the Web3 business segments of Amber and SBI.

In the non-listed private sector, revenue is similarly divided among several key entities:

Centralized exchanges and trading infrastructure account for about 40% of their total revenue, with fewer than 10 leading CEXs earning about 30% of the private sector's revenue in the first half of the year, with Binance alone capturing nearly half of the overall CEX fees. If self-trading profits from market makers are included, this category generated an astonishing cash flow of up to $13 billion to $14 billion in the first half of 2026.

Additionally, on-chain entertainment and gambling (such as Stake.com) account for 9%; asset management, institutional brokerage, and ETF services account for 7%; prediction markets account for 5%; non-public PoW mining and staking networks generated about 30% of revenue; while in the non-token issuance protocols, Telegram's Fragment (which generated $180 million in the first half of the year) and Axiom ($125 million) dominated the on-chain payment flows.

After Excluding Specific Infrastructures, Token Protocols Capture a High Proportion of User Payments

Image: The real capture ratio of token protocols in user payment revenue after excluding infrastructure

In the first three quarters of 2026, the share of issued token protocols in the total industry revenue was 26%, dropping to a low point since 2020. Understanding this phenomenon requires penetrating the three core logics behind it:

First, traditional entities and centralized giants have captured more "derived other revenues" such as stablecoin treasury interest, mining, and staking, diluting the accounting share of token protocols; second, in direct user payments, public chain transaction Gas fees have plummeted from a peak of 9% of the total industry in 2021 to currently less than 3%; third, during market volatility cycles, the willingness of new protocols to issue tokens that can generate positive cash flow has significantly decreased, diverting revenue to many high-quality non-issued protocols.

If we exclude public chain Gas fees and derived interest, and analyze only the pure application layer protocols targeting direct user payments, both issued and non-issued protocols are actually capturing their real revenue shares at historical highs.

Protocol Fees Exhibit a Winner-Takes-All Pattern, but Top Rankings Continue to Rotate

Image: The winner-takes-all effect of top protocols and the historical rotation cycle of industry revenue leaders

In the realm of decentralized protocols, the Matthew effect is particularly pronounced: the top 20 protocols capture 60% of the direct user payments on the entire network.

At the current operating rate, by 2026, 30 on-chain protocols will steadily enter the $100 million club for annual fee revenue.

The business expansion of head protocols is mainly advancing along two major lines: horizontal cross-ecosystem expansion (for example, Uniswap betting its core growth engine on the Robinhood exclusive chain, which has contributed two-thirds of its fee revenue); and vertical deepening of track value (such as Jupiter achieving a one-stop closed loop from DEX, contracts to lending, Polymarket expanding into contract trading and native stablecoins, and Pump.fun extending to trading front-end and wallets).

In the top twenty rankings, Canton, Polymarket, Pons, edgeX, Titan Builder, and Morpho have shown strong late-stage momentum; while Meteora, which once topped the list with over $1 billion in annual fees, has now fallen to ninth place.

Robinhood Exclusive Chain Ranks Among Top Three in Ecosystem Fees Upon Launch

Image: Distribution of ecosystem fees showing Robinhood exclusive chain ranking among the top three in the entire network.

The comprehensive ecological value of a blockchain equals the basic transaction gas fees earned by the public chain layer, plus the total fees generated by all upper-layer decentralized applications deployed on it.

In the third quarter of 2026, the combined fee income of the two major public chain ecosystems, Ethereum and Solana, has historically fallen below the psychological threshold of 50%, marking the full arrival of the multi-polarization era of public chain ecosystems.

The exclusive financial public chain launched by Robinhood in July (Robinhood Chain) has shown tremendous momentum, capturing 14% of the ecosystem fee share in just a few months after its launch, surpassing Hyperliquid to become the third-largest ecological cluster in the industry.

Will Hyperliquid End the Cyclical Rotation of Perpetual Contract Leaders?

Image: The reshaping of the cyclical rotation pattern by Hyperliquid's position as the leader in perpetual contract trading.

Hyperliquid has now become the largest on-chain perpetual contract platform in terms of trading volume and fee income, and is the fifth-generation king in this track after dYdX, Synthetix, GMX, and Jupiter.

Compared to previous leaders, Hyperliquid has built a deeper collaborative barrier: it achieves profit sharing through innovative developer codes (Builder Codes) and third-party operating markets (HIP-3 proposal), successfully stimulating a massive influx of third-party front-end access, and greatly accelerating the coverage of RWA assets including crude oil and US stocks.

Currently, the share of independent third-party developers and market-making teams has accounted for 16% of Hyperliquid's total fees, and this proportion is still steadily rising.

Hyperliquid is about to set a record for maintaining the top position in perpetual contract DEX fees for two consecutive years, with its market share in 2026 not decreasing but increasing. This has sparked deep reflection in the industry: Is Hyperliquid breaking the past cycle of changing leaders every round?

Morpho Shows Strong Resilience in Curated Lending Market Amid Industry Downturn

Image: Morpho's curated lending market demonstrates resilience against the overall downturn in the lending industry.

In the decentralized lending field, the leading protocol Aave's business contraction has dragged down the entire industry's lending fee payments, which have halved year-on-year.

However, Morpho, which firmly holds the second position in the lending track, has shown strong anti-cyclical resilience, with its third-quarter fee income slightly increasing to $62 million. Most of this income was captured by professional risk-curation institutions (such as Steakhouse Financial and Gauntlet) that have settled on the Morpho platform through refined fund pool risk management.

In contrast, Aave has suffered a significant liquidity shock in the second quarter, leading to a substantial setback in fund accumulation, and is currently in a slow trust recovery phase. The two leading lending protocols are engaged in a comprehensive battle over the collateral rights of tokenized US Treasury bonds and credit-linked RWA assets.

How Do Capital Markets Value Revenue-Generating Projects?

Image: Valuation pricing framework for different blockchain revenue-generating entities in the secondary capital market.

Among the blockchain revenues generated across the industry, about 40% of the share can be directly captured and invested by public investors through circulating tokens or listed stocks in the secondary market.

In the token investment field, implementing real value distribution to token holders (whether through on-chain dividends or fee buybacks and burns) has become the most critical factor determining the asset return rates and valuation multiples in 2026.

Dividend token indices have outperformed Bitcoin by 82% this year, while the absolute total amount of fees allocated to the community by application layer protocols has reached a historical peak.

In terms of valuation multiples, publicly listed exchanges and internet brokerages have a price-to-sales ratio currently situated between dividend DeFi protocols and consumer-grade protocols; while public chain infrastructure still enjoys a very high valuation premium, with its price-to-sales ratios generally maintaining astronomical levels around 2000 times.

Among publicly listed companies, those with diversified stable cash flows have become long-term winners. Robinhood has emerged as the most dazzling star stock, maintaining a blockchain revenue share of 20% to 30% since the first quarter of 2025; listed mining companies have achieved continuous double-digit returns over the years by decisively transforming into high-performance AI computing centers.

Token Protocols Implementing Dividends Significantly Outperform Bitcoin in 2026

Image: Protocols distributing dividends to token holders significantly outperform Bitcoin trends.

We systematically backtested and quantitatively analyzed over 60 potential factors influencing token secondary market performance from 2021 to 2026.

Empirical data clearly indicates that distributing real value to holders (implementing stock-like dividends) is the most statistically significant factor driving tokens to outperform across the industry.

In the past few years, tokens outperforming Bitcoin have been rare; however, in 2026, both market-cap weighted and equally weighted "dividend token indices" have shown excellent performance significantly surpassing Bitcoin.

Other conventional factors are either merely derivative subsets of "value distribution" (such as token buyback and burn mechanisms or protocol fee generation capabilities) or show zero correlation in statistical tests.

As of the third quarter of 2026, the number of protocols implementing cash flow dividends to token holders has reached a record 283, and the proportion of dividend amounts to total protocol fees has also set a historical high.

Valuation Multiples of Listed Exchanges and Brokerages Between Dividend DeFi and Consumer-Grade Protocols

Image: Comparison of price-to-sales ratios of listed exchanges and brokerages with DeFi and consumer-grade protocol valuation multiples.

Capital markets assign distinctly different valuation pricing multiples to different asset forms:

Among publicly listed companies, Coinbase has a price-to-sales ratio of about 8 times, Robinhood about 17 times, while Gemini and eToro are at a lower level of about 3 times.

The various valuation multiples of consumer-grade on-chain protocols generally fall within the range of 6 to 10 times, clearly reflecting their characteristic of directly passing on most captured fees to holders.

In the DeFi field, protocols implementing value dividends have relatively lower valuation multiples; among them, decentralized spot exchanges (DEX) and decentralized lending protocols have the lowest price-to-sales ratios.

Public chain infrastructure exhibits extreme valuation characteristics: if calculated based on direct transaction fees, its valuation multiple reaches about 2000 times; if calculated based on the value distributed to holders, its valuation level gradually converges to align with conventional application layers.

Top Protocols Show Superior Fee Capture Efficiency Compared to Public Companies

Image: Top protocols demonstrate superior fee capture efficiency compared to financing amounts of traditional public companies.

Relying on open-source code and the ultra-high capital operation efficiency of underlying blockchain infrastructure, leading decentralized protocols exhibit the characteristic of leveraging astonishing fee income with extremely low capital expenditure.

Some top-performing high-yield protocols have never engaged in any external equity financing yet have created astonishing cash flows: Hyperliquid captured fees of up to $939 million over the past twelve months (TTM), while Fragment reached $378 million.

In traditional publicly listed companies, exchanges, brokerages, asset management institutions, and stablecoin issuers have a median annualized income of about 1.1 times for every dollar of funds raised; while capital-intensive Bitcoin mining companies only achieve 0.4 times (the median for traditional data asset companies is as low as 0.07 times).

In contrast, the ratio for unlisted centralized giants (such as Binance) is expected to be as high as 2.3 times; while public chain infrastructure, due to its large token circulation market value, has capital efficiency indicators far lower than application layers and corporate entities.

Future Industry Outlook: What Can We Expect?

Image: Recovery path of blockchain industry revenue in 2027 and core observation themes for the future.

With the large-scale leap in the performance of underlying public chains, the gradual clearing of regulatory compliance fog, and the accelerated influx of traditional giants, the industry's revenue is expected to return to an upward trajectory by 2027 after experiencing deleveraging in this cycle.

Core Trends Continue: Three Major Evolution Themes Worth Watching

We anticipate that the core trends outlined in this report will continue to deepen and evolve in the coming quarters:

The underlying blockchain infrastructure will further expand, empowering more upper-layer applications to complete the commercial monetization loop, while the revenue share of the infrastructure itself will continue its structural downward trend.

With clear global regulatory frameworks in place and the momentum of asset tokenization, the revenue share from institutional adoption and real-world economic use cases will steadily increase.

Traditional publicly listed giants will continue to expand their strategic absorption of global on-chain revenue, leveraging their licensing and compliance advantages.

On this basis, there are three frontier core themes with explosive potential and strategic observation value:

The first is a settled development line: on-chain real-time data is becoming a new holy grail for traditional hedge funds to capture excess Alpha.

The second is a fiercely debated frontier exploration: can machine-native economies driven by autonomous AI agents truly ignite trillion-dollar on-chain real revenue?

The third is a profound industry reshaping: token forms are increasingly acquiring statutory rights characteristics similar to traditional equity, while traditional stocks are gradually integrating the all-weather circulation attributes of tokens.

On-Chain Data Becomes a New Alpha: RWA Perpetual Contracts Provide Leading Price Signals During US Market Closures

Figure: Overview of the three frontier core themes driving the evolution of blockchain revenue.

Figure: On-chain RWA perpetual contracts provide leading signals for traditional crude oil futures prices during US market closures.

Figure: Hyperliquid's on-chain crude oil perpetual contracts accurately price CME's opening gap during weekend market closures.

The all-weather operating RWA perpetual contracts and decentralized prediction markets are providing unprecedented non-trading hours and Pre-IPO pre-pricing signals for global capital markets.

During the weekend when traditional exchanges are closed, the crude oil perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid responded sharply to sudden geopolitical conflicts in the Middle East, accurately anticipating 87% to 97% of the CME's Monday opening gap.

In the Pre-IPO pricing field, SpaceX's on-chain tokenized stock formed an extremely active trading fair price on-chain a full 7 months before officially filing its prospectus in the US stock market.

Although these on-chain markets still appear immature when measured against Wall Street's stringent liquidity standards, the leading signals they emit have drawn significant attention from traditional finance: Bloomberg has officially integrated the market data of Hyperliquid's RWA contracts and stablecoin data into Bloomberg terminals.

On-Chain Data Empowers Forward-Looking Predictions of Listed Crypto Companies' Financial Performance

Figure: The predictive ability of on-chain user payment data for quarterly financial performance of listed crypto companies.

For publicly listed companies that heavily rely on blockchain ecosystems for revenue, the open and transparent on-chain data provides securities analysts with an almost perfect leading indicator for predicting their quarterly financial performance, rapidly becoming a standard analytical tool in Wall Street research reports.

For Coinbase, a simple regression model based on on-chain user direct payment data has resulted in a median prediction error of less than 2% for its official revenue since 2025; the estimation deviations published by CoinMetrics and Messari have consistently remained at extremely low single-digit levels.

For Circle, the on-chain real-time issuance and destruction flow of its USDC is completely open and transparent, allowing research institutions to maintain a prediction error of less than 1% for its treasury reserve interest income.

For Bitcoin mining companies, due to the real-time on-chain data of network mining difficulty, block rewards, transaction fees, and mining pool addresses, analysts can accurately deduce their quarterly mining gross profit through hash rate pricing and actual hash rate before the monthly operational reports are disclosed.

The prediction market goes a step further, directly opening derivative contracts around key quarterly financial indicators of listed companies, with the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and Robinhood both announcing the launch of SEC-regulated corporate earnings prediction contracts.

Can Machine-Native Economies Become a New Driving Engine for On-Chain Revenue?

Figure: The potential and challenges of autonomous AI agents and machine-native economies driving on-chain revenue.

BlackRock's report on "Machine-Native Economies" points out that artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming the largest potential demand side for digital assets, primarily relying on autonomous micropayments between agents and decentralized computing power trading networks.

However, as of now, the actual commercial conversion scale of AI on blockchain infrastructure remains very limited: in the first three quarters of 2026, on-chain user direct payments attributed to AI concepts amounted to only about $200 million, still in the exploratory stage.

As emphasized in our "Trust Cost Theory 2.0": as the cost of machine intelligence approaches zero, the bottleneck of the entire economic system is shifting towards "trustworthy deployment channels" (including identity credentials, data rights confirmation, execution strategies, and on-chain instant settlement).

The micropayment channels for agents achieved underlying technical validation for high-frequency small payments in 2026, but in mainstream commercial scenarios, mainstream agent frameworks have quickly integrated into traditional credit card networks; blockchain settlement channels may retreat to high-compliance friction areas that traditional payments cannot cover (such as cross-border large-scale clearing and unbanked marginal markets).

In the decentralized computing power and derivatives field, decentralized AI computing power and reasoning networks have collectively generated approximately $7 million in protocol fee income this year (e.g., USD.AI has accumulated over $300 million in computing credit flow); the CME officially launched NVIDIA H100 and B200 computing futures in October, and Kalshi's CEO boldly predicts that the computing derivatives market will exceed $100 trillion by 2030.

Tokens Are Increasingly Acquiring Equity Characteristics, While Traditional Stocks Are Gradually Integrating Token Attributes

We believe that the on-chain capital formation mechanism is at a historical turning point towards a fully mature market, with two interwoven evolutionary trends accelerating the boundary fusion of tokens and traditional equity:

On one hand, the tokenization of equity is evolving: more and more token protocols are beginning to break free from hollow economic commitments, actively granting token holders substantial statutory rights guarantees similar to traditional equity (for example, the widely sought-after on-chain cash flow dividends and buyback mechanisms mentioned earlier).

On the other hand, the tokenization of traditional stocks is being reshaped: the traditional stock market is accelerating the absorption of the technical characteristics of crypto-native tokens, fully exploring 24/7 on-chain instant clearing and settlement, programmable automated dividend distribution, and seamless cross-border combinability.

Conclusion and Outlook

The end of the 2025 bull market frenzy also marked a historic peak in the total revenue of the blockchain industry. However, after experiencing deep cyclical deleveraging, the total revenue of the entire industry is expected to stabilize and rebound in the third quarter of 2026, steadily approaching the $100 billion mark for the year.

Beneath the surface of the industry's overall pullback, the real revenue anchored in institutional adoption and real-world economic use cases is accelerating its rise, accounting for 30% of the industry's revenue weight in 2026. This historic shift is accompanied by traditional Wall Street financial institutions' full-stack penetration and equity layout from underlying infrastructure, middleware to application layer interaction front ends.

The number of protocols successfully achieving positive commercial monetization is continuously growing, and more importantly, the number of protocols implementing real cash flow dividends to holders has set a historical record; in 2026, allocating such dividend assets became the only winning strategy to significantly outperform Bitcoin and mainstream indices.

Looking ahead, under the clear global regulatory spring breeze, the massive tokenization of quality assets, and the multiple resonance of secondary market valuation bottoms, the blockchain industry's revenue is expected to welcome a structural strong rebound in the coming quarters.

This vividly reflects the comprehensive acceleration of the integration between traditional finance and the crypto world: on-chain real-time data analysis is no longer an optional frontier exploration but an essential survival skill for every serious investor in this new capital era.

How We Calculate Blockchain Industry Revenue

Statistical Standards and Accounting Scope

This report strictly focuses on business entities and decentralized protocols that rely on blockchain underlying infrastructure to conduct operations and obtain sustainable commercial revenue:

The accounting scope first includes service fees directly paid by users: covering transaction and exchange fees that occur directly on-chain (such as token exchanges on Uniswap or transfers on the Ethereum mainnet), as well as fees paid to centralized service providers off-chain (such as trading commissions charged by centralized exchanges or security custody fees paid by institutions).

Secondly, it includes other derivative revenues closely related to the blockchain ecosystem: including PoW block rewards, PoS validator staking income, and the interest income earned by institutions from allocating US treasury bonds using stablecoin reserves.

The core focus of this report is on macro global scale, core structural evolution trends, and underlying core driving forces. The value capture of token holders or treasuries is only briefly outlined, and the specific micro cost structure and net profit margins of enterprises are not within the accounting scope of this report.

Classification Framework and Core Definitions

The classification standards of this report integrate the industry classification methods of international mainstream data analysis platforms such as DeFiLlama, TokenTerminal, CoinGecko, and Messari, deeply categorizing the entire ecosystem into six core sectors: blockchain underlying infrastructure, middleware, decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN), DeFi and finance, wallet interaction front end, and consumer applications.

In terms of revenue aggregation, the report maps it to four dimensions based on the real sources of economic use cases: traditional institutional adoption, real-world economic use cases, blockchain-native applications, and underlying infrastructure.

A rigorous elimination of overlapping revenues across domains has been conducted: for example, the income earned by Apollo Private Equity in the on-chain tokenized credit fund is counted under the institutional adoption dimension, rather than the real economy dimension; similarly, the settlement revenue captured by Visa in the stablecoin credit card network is only counted under the institutional dimension to prevent inflated data.

Data Sources and Research Methods

The data monitoring network for this report covers 2,621 decentralized protocols active on the entire network from 2020 to the third quarter of 2026, as well as the officially audited quarterly financial disclosures of 104 publicly listed companies worldwide.

The research team focused on tackling the issue of double counting on-chain (for example, the overlapping fee deductions that occur when Layer 2 settles to Layer 1 public chains) and conducted rigorous isolation and cleaning of the proprietary market-making profits of market makers and the trading commissions of centralized exchange users.

The core data sources include mainstream on-chain analysis platforms such as Allium, DeFiLlama, Dune, and TokenTerminal, and systematic cross-calibration has been conducted in conjunction with the audited regulatory filing documents of enterprises to ensure the objectivity, rigor, and authority of the global data.