Wallets, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and other protocols closest to users are increasingly capturing economic value, while the underlying networks receive a proportionally smaller share.
A growing share of fee revenue in the blockchain industry is now being captured by decentralized finance (DeFi) applications rather than by the underlying networks themselves, highlighting a shift toward user-facing products and away from base layer chains.
According to data shared by Jamie Coutts, chief crypto analyst at Real Vision, DeFi applications today generate five times more fees than the blockchains they operate on. This suggests that wallets, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and other protocols closest to users are increasingly capturing economic value, while the underlying networks receive a proportionally smaller share.
“Hard to ignore the relative shift in DeFi. Only 1.5yrs ago, DeFi apps generated ~2X the fee revenue of blockchains. Today it’s closer to 5X. (see chart)
While I am a believer that blockchain’s network effects will always command a premium, it makes sense that more value than what is currently ascribed should drift to the front end – wallets, DeFi apps, and protocols closest to users,” Coutts wrote in a post on X.
Fee data compiled by DeFiLlama shows that the highest-earning crypto products over the past 30 days were overwhelmingly DeFi protocols or applications, not base-layer blockchains.
Of the top 20 entities by fees,
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This dynamic underscores the growing role of DeFi apps – from wallets to trading and finance protocols – as the primary fee generators in the ecosystem. As developers and institutional investors increasingly focus on front-end products, the value captured by these applications continues to rise relative to the networks that power them.
Although DeFi protocols lead in revenue capture, on-chain activity remains concentrated on a few chains.
Solana was the most active network over the past month, with more than 68 million active addresses, a 14 % increase, while Ethereum recorded around 13 million monthly active addresses, up 53%.
