Weekly fundamentals #33

A week-over-week momentum overview of the top blockchains & dapps across our key metrics.

Key highlights:

📊 Arbitrum, DeFi Saver, Connext, Gains Network, NounsDAO, and Gitcoin are now listed on Token Terminal.

🔬 New post in our research series: The state of Synthetix.

✍️ We published a write-up of our discussion on the current state of Liquity with COO Michael Svoboda.

Charts of the week

💰Total value locked (TVL)

Which projects currently have the most assets deposited into their smart contracts?

Top projects by latest TVL

Top projects based on daily TVL in the past 30 days

This week’s top gainers by TVL

Daily TVL for this week’s top movers in the past 180 days

Key takeaways

• While TVL is useful as a technical metric to measure how much value is deposited into a protocol's smart contracts, it doesn't necessarily tell investors how a protocol is performing financially.
• E.g. for MakerDAO, TVL is equal to the value of assets that borrowers deposit into Maker Vaults. This is because these deposits are not withdrawn from the vaults, as the protocol creates the DAI that users borrow. TVL = deposits.
• Deposits on Maker do not directly generate revenue for the protocol. In our view, a better way to measure Maker's performance would be to focus on either borrowing volume (outstanding debt) or interest paid.
• Check out our brief video on TVL, i.e. what it means & how it can be used to measure the performance of different protocols.

📈Total revenue (fees paid)

Which projects have generated the most fees/yield?

Top projects by cumulative total revenue in the past 7 days

Top projects based on daily total revenue in the past 30 days

This week’s top gainers by total revenue

Daily total revenue for this week’s top gainers in the past 180 days

Key takeaways

• In terms of aggregate fee revenue, Ethereum is in a league of its own.
• As more applications start to expand and go multi-chain, it’s possible that they surpass Ethereum (or any single underlying blockchain they're using) in total fee revenue.

📉Price to sales (P/S) ratio

How are projects priced relative to total fees/yield generated?

Top projects by latest P/S ratio

This week’s top movers by P/S ratio

Key takeaways

• The P/S ratio is an ideal valuation method, especially for early-stage protocols that often have little or no net income (because revenue is reinvested into growth, often by subsidizing the use of the protocol’s service).
• While the P/S ratio offers a highly useful and accurate tool for relative analysis between different early-stage crypto protocols, it’s always worth considering how much of the fee revenue or usage is tied to token incentives that are paid to users – a data point that we’re actively working on including in all of our dashboards.

📈Protocol revenue

Protocol revenue is the share of the total revenue that accrues to the benefit of token holders or the company behind the protocol.

Top projects by cumulative protocol revenue in the past 7 days

Top projects based on daily protocol revenue in the past 30 days

This week’s top gainers by protocol revenue

Daily protocol revenue for this week’s top movers in the past 180 days

Key takeaways

• Protocol revenue represents the share of revenue generated from a protocol’s business that is subsequently allocated to its treasury or distributed to its token holders.
• There are three typical scenarios for revenue distribution to tokenholders:

📉Price to earnings (P/E) ratio

The 'E' in the P/E ratio is based on protocol revenue, i.e. the share of the total revenue that accrues to the benefit of token holders or the company behind the protocol.

Top projects by latest P/E ratio

This week’s top movers by P/E ratio

Key takeaways

• For protocols like Uniswap, where all trading fees currently go to the liquidity providers (supply-side), there won’t be a P/E ratio available.
• Note that we have yet to include cost & expense data in full for these protocols (e.g. off-chain development costs & token incentives), which is why these numbers should be used as directional input for a protocol’s valuation.

*Note: We have excluded dapps & blockchains with revenue figures under $10k/week.**Note:‘change’ is calculated as a snapshot comparison, whereas ‘trend’ is calculated by comparing the given time interval against its previous time interval.

🆕 New listing(s)

Arbitrum is now live on Token Terminal!

DeFi Saver is now live on Token Terminal!

Connext is now live on Token Terminal!

Gains Network is now live on Token Terminal!

NounsDAO is now live on Token Terminal!

Gitcoin is now live on Token Terminal!

Visit us: tokenterminal.com

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