Strip out the token prices and this market has a revenue line: what users pay to have transactions executed, denominated in real assets and reported daily. It is the figure to reach for when somebody quotes a market capitalization as though it were a business.
$46.7m
Fees on 21 March 2026
+3.3%
Against seven days earlier
$1.7bn
Trailing thirty days
$20.1bn
Annualized from that run rate
Source: DeFiLlama, daily series. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
| Protocol | Category | Fees, 24 hours | Fees, 30 days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tether | Stablecoin Issuer | $15.88m | $478.6m |
| Circle USDC | Stablecoin Issuer | $6.44m | $190.5m |
| PumpSwap | Dexs | $4.66m | $78.0m |
| Hyperliquid Perps | Derivatives | $3.41m | $62.3m |
| pump.fun | Launchpad | $2.65m | $44.2m |
| Axiom | Trading App | $2.54m | $37.0m |
| Uniswap V4 | Dexs | $2.27m | $46.0m |
| Pons V2 | Launchpad | $2.02m | $8.4m |
Daily protocol fees, all chains
Daily, in dollars.
Source: DeFiLlama, daily series. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
Fees are the honest revenue line
Almost every valuation figure in this market derives from a token price, which is circular. Fees do not. They are payments made by users to have something executed, denominated in real assets, and reported daily. They are small in absolute terms against any traditional venue, and that smallness is itself the most useful thing about them.
How this was measured
- Total value locked is DeFiLlama’s daily series: the dollar value of assets held in the smart contracts of protocols deployed on each chain, priced at that day’s marks. It moves when capital arrives or leaves and also when the price of the assets already there moves, which is the single most important caveat and is the reason this column reads it against price rather than alone. Fees are protocol revenue as reported by DeFiLlama, aggregated daily. A piece dated one day uses observations through the day before, and every figure names the date it belongs to.
