Curve six times in January, the perspective of protocol revenue reveals who is the real 'value coin'?

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Nan Zhi (@Assassin_Malvo)

Recently, in the leading market surge of BTC, besides the ‘old altcoin’ zone, Decentralized Finance project Tokens have also generally performed well. Taking CRV (Curve) as an example, it has surged from 0.2 USDT to a high of 1.24 USDT in the past month, with an increase of over 500%. According to Token Terminal data, Curve Finance has an annualized income of nearly 37 million USD in the past 30 days, with a rise of nearly 23% compared to the previous period.

Tokens of this kind share common features: they have been in circulation for many years, have a low unlocking ratio, and the sustainability of protocol revenue has been verified over time. In addition to CRV, which tokens meet these criteria? Odaily will conduct a survey in this article.

Basic Situation Description

This data is based on DefiLlama and CoinGecko, where:

Project selection: top 60 in 24-hour revenue on DefiLlama;

Data selection: protocol 24-hour revenue and 30-day revenue (DefiLlama), protocol Token circulating Market Cap and FDV (CoinGecko)

Other situations: there are special situations such as protocol not yet launching coin, about to launch coin, and mixing Token with multiple protocols, which will be verified and judged by the author through other materials.

Due to the large amount of data, no charts are shown. For complete data on 60 projects, please see the link: 01928374656574839201

Top 20 Projects by Revenue

The top 20 projects are shown in the following figure. From the table, we can see several points:

TOP income projects are mainly divided into three categories, network (chain), Decentralized Finance and MEME tools;

Most Tokens have been unlocked by more than half, only JTO (Jito) and ETHFI (ether.fi) have a lower unlock ratio;

The Meme tools have not yet launched coins, and they account for 20% in the top 20, among which Pump, Photon, and BullX generate fee income and are all on the Solana chain, while DEX Screener mainly generates advertising revenue for MemeToken.

Only two projects with a total revenue ÷ circulating Market Cap of over three digits on the 30th, Jito and Raydium, both on the Solana chain;

(Note: The tenth ranked is Uniswap Labs, and the second is Uniswap protocol itself.)

Who has the highest cost-effectiveness?

Exclude the unreleased coin projects and sort them in descending order of 30-day total revenue ÷ circulating Market Cap to obtain the following table.

One of the more niche projects is Gamma, ranked first, and WigoSwap, ranked fifth. Gamma is a Liquidity management protocol on ZKsync, and the protocol’s income has been relatively stable in the long term, with monthly revenue ranging from about $1 million to $4 million, while Token stakers have the right to share in the Gamma treasury income.

WigoSwap is the Decentralized Finance Hub on the original Fantom. It will be renamed as Decentralized Financeve along with the change of Fantom to Sonic. The protocol business will also expand to multiple fields such as Swap, task platform (similar to Galaxy), asset trading market, games, etc.

WigoSwap’s revenue has recently started to rise, and its sustainability is temporarily unclear, but it is worth paying special attention to with the arrival of Sonic.

In terms of Token use cases, according to the official documentation, WIGO can only be used as a circulating Token within the ecosystem, and no explanation regarding profit rights has been found.

Other protocols are well-known products (LFJ as the original Trader Joe), not much to elaborate here, but you can focus on following their data inflection points, with 30-day total revenue ÷ FDV as follows.

Is there a chance if the coin project has not been launched?

The projects ranked in the top 60 by revenue and have not launched coins are shown in the figure below. It can be seen that the majority of them are Meme tools, with a small probability of launching a coin. Currently, the only ones with a high probability of launching a coin are Pump and OpenSea, but both of them have a very low cost-effectiveness ratio for active wash trading. It is recommended that readers seek opportunities outside the table.