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

Author: Nanzhi, Odaily Planet Daily

Recently, in the bullish market led by Bitcoin, besides the rising zone, Decentralized Finance project Token also performed well. Taking CRV (Curve) as an example, it has pumped from 0.2 USDT to a high of 1.24 USDT in the past month, with a rise of over 500%. According to Token Terminal data, Curve Finance’s annual revenue in the past 30 days is close to 37 million US dollars, a rise of nearly 23% compared to the previous period.

The common characteristics of such Tokens are that they have been in circulation for many years, have a small unlocking ratio, and the sustainability of protocol income has also been verified over time. In addition to CRV, which Tokens meet these characteristics? Odaily will conduct a statistics in this article.

Basic Profile Description

This data is based on DefiLlama and CoinGecko, where:

Project Selection: Top 60 24-hour Revenue on DefiLlama;

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

Other situations: there are special cases such as protocol not launched coin, about to launch coin, and mixed use of Token with multiple protocols, which will be verified and judged by the author through other information.

Due to the large amount of data, the complete data of 60 projects is available at the link: 01928374656574839201

Top 20 projects by revenue

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

TOP revenue 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 relatively low unlocking ratio;

Meme tools have not yet launched coin, accounting for 20% in the top 20, among which Pump, Photon, BullX generate revenue from transaction fees and are all on-chain on Solana, while DEX Screener mainly generates revenue from advertising of Meme Tokens;

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

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

Who has the best cost performance ratio?

Exclude the unreleased coin projects, and obtain the table in descending order of total revenue ÷ circulating Market Cap as of the 30th day.

One of the more niche projects is Gamma, ranked first, and WigoSwap, ranked fifth. Gamma is a Liquidity management protocol on ZKsync. The protocol’s income has been relatively stable for a long time, with monthly revenue of around 1 million to 4 million US dollars, and Token stakers have the right to a share of Gamma’s treasury income.

WigoSwap is the Decentralized Finance Hub on Fantom, which will be renamed to Decentralized Financeve as Fantom changes 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 unclear for now, but it is worth paying special attention to follow with Sonic’s arrival.

On the Token use case, according to the official documentation, it can be seen that WIGO is only used as a circulating Token within the ecosystem, and no mention of profit rights has been found.

Other protocols, which are well-known products (LFJ is the original Trader Joe), will not be elaborated here. You can focus on following their data inflection points, and the 30-day total revenue ÷ FDV is as follows.

Is there a chance for the unlaunched coin project?

The projects with income ranking in the top 60 and not yet launched coins are shown in the figure below. It can be seen that the vast majority are Meme tools, with a small probability of launching coins. Currently, the probability of launching coins is high only for Pump and OpenSea, but the cost-effectiveness of both in actively engaging in wash trading is very low. Readers are advised to look for opportunities outside the table.