Weekly fundamentals #48

A walkthrough of the most interesting charts and trends in crypto, with a focus on key business drivers and protocol fundamentals. Let’s dig in!

Key highlights from the past week at Token Terminal:

🆕 We launched a new and improved version of the Token Terminal API.

📊 DFX Finance is now listed on Token Terminal.

🎙 Watch our latest episode of 15-minute fundamentals with Ribbon Finance on YouTube or listen to the audio version on any podcast platform.

Earnings leaderboard

Which projects have earned more in revenue than they have paid out via token incentives?

Top 10 projects by earnings in the past 7 days

Earnings = revenue - token incentives.If this number is negative, a project spends more on token issuance than it earns in revenue.

Explore the full earnings leaderboard here.

Charts to watch

A walkthrough of the most interesting charts and trends across our key metrics.

Bridge exploits account for ~50% of all DeFi exploits, totaling ~$2.5B in lost assets

• Bridge exploits account for nearly half of all exploited funds in DeFi (~$2.5B of a total of ~$5.2B). Out of the 6 largest DeFi exploits, 5 have been on bridges.
• These hacks can typically be attributed to either smart contract loopholes (e.g. Wormhole and Nomad) or compromised private keys (e.g. Ronin and Harmony).

The result of lower fees on Ethereum L2s: more users, but less revenue

• As a result of technological upgrades, such as Arbitrum Nitro and gas optimizations on Optimism, the gas fees required to transact on L2s have been reduced considerably since the beginning of 2022.
• As less fees are being paid on L2s, the revenues have also been on a downward trend, despite a growth in monthly active users.
• Jan 2022:
• Sep 2022:

Is Lido a case example of token incentives well spent? Lido’s token incentive spend is 6x more than Rocket Pool’s, but it has 30x the TVL

• The liquid staking protocol Lido Finance has paid out ~$90M in token incentives to its users during 2022, while its competitor Rocket Pool has paid out ~$15M.
• Even if Lido has spent 6x more on user acquisition compared to its main competitor, it has also managed to acquire roughly 30x more in user deposits (an average monthly TVL of ~$10B vs. Rocket Pool’s ~$0.3B).

Head over to tokenterminal.com for a more detailed view of the top blockchains & dapps.

This week’s video

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