Encryption "fat protocols": Key players in 10 core profit-generating areas

Author: Stacy Muur

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

The original "fat protocol" theory held that the value of cryptocurrency would disproportionately flow to the underlying blockchain rather than to applications. This view is no longer valid.

By 2026, value will flow to "control points": interfaces that understand user intent, trading venues that internalize liquidity, issuers that hold balance sheets, and entities that can tokenize inefficient assets. Regardless of which chain ultimately prevails, which application becomes popular, or which narrative dominates, these entities will be able to collect fees.

Based on indicators such as revenue, number of users, ARPU (average annual revenue per user), market dominance, and capital efficiency, this ranking clearly shows at which layers of value are truly "fat," why they are becoming fat, and where the next wave of marginal value will flow.

1. "Fat" wallet

Leader: Phantom

Annualized revenue: Approximately US$105 million (approximately US$35 million in the third quarter of 2025)

User count: Approximately 15 million monthly active users

ARPU: Approximately $7 per user per year

Market position: Approximately 39% of the Solana wallet market share.

Performance and match:

With its dominance at the Intent Layer, Phantom has become the leading consumer wallet on the Solana platform. Positioned upstream of Swap, NFTs, Perps, and payments, Phantom enables users to monetize their actions before the value reaches DEXs or protocols.

The launch of Phantom Perps saw transaction volume exceed $1 billion within weeks. This confirms that wallets are evolving from passive interfaces into active financial venues. Phantom's $150 million Series C funding round, completed in January 2025, valued the company at $3 billion, reflects market acceptance of this shift.

Main competitors:

• MetaMask: Expanding monetization channels by integrating perpetual contracts and Swap, and launching a $30 million LINEA incentive program to deepen ecosystem engagement.
• Trust Wallet: With over 200 million downloads and having intercepted $162 million in fraud, it demonstrates strong distributed payment capabilities, but its ARPU is relatively weak.

2. "Fat" Blockchain

Leader: Ethereum

Annualized revenue from the agreement: approximately $300 million

Users: Approximately 8.6 million monthly active users (MAU)

ARPU: Approximately $30-35 per user per year

Performance and match:

Ethereum remains the core settlement layer in the crypto space. Its value does not come from high-throughput consumer execution, but from its role as the ultimate arbiter of high-value transactions, MEV withdrawals, stablecoins, and financial settlements across rollups and institutions.

Ethereum's fee base is supported by MEVs, blob fees, and settlement requirements, rather than simply the number of transactions. This makes it grow slower than execution chains, but it is more defensive as capital becomes more concentrated.

Main competitors:

• Solana: A leading "fat" execution chain with peak monthly revenue of approximately $240 million, driven by memecoins, perpetual transactions, and consumer applications. Performance upgrades (Firedancer, Alpenglow) further solidify its growth momentum.
• Base: The fastest growing L2 in terms of activity, with triple-digit growth in transaction volume; Uniswap's cumulative transaction volume exceeds $200 billion—positioned as the consumer execution branch of Ethereum.

3. "Fat" Perp DEX

Leader: Hyperliquid

Annualized revenue: Approximately $950 million to $1 billion

Open interest: approximately $6.5 billion

Perpetual trading volume (30 days): approximately US$225 billion

Performance and match:

Perpetual contracts are the most profitable trading method in the crypto space, and Hyperliquid has monopolized this market. Hyperliquid achieves fee collection by integrating liquidity, execution, and order flow on a single dedicated chain, avoiding MEV leakage and routing fragmentation.

In July 2025 alone, Hyperliquid accounted for approximately 35% of all blockchain protocol revenue and led all crypto projects in token buybacks.

Main competitors:

• Lighter: It developed rapidly in its early stages, with a cumulative trading volume exceeding $1 trillion and a monthly trading volume of approximately $300 billion, but its profit margin was low.
• Drift: Cumulative trading volume of approximately $2 trillion, TVL of approximately $3.2 billion, and revenue of approximately $49 million – strong growth, but weak market dominance.

4. "Fat" lending

Leader: Aave

Annualized revenue: approximately US$115 million

Users: Approximately 120,000 monthly active users

TVL: Approximately US$320-350 billion

Capital utilization rate: approximately 40%

Performance and match:

Aave is a leading lending platform in the DeFi space. While lending profit margins are typically lower than those on trading platforms, Aave compensates for this with its scale, resilience, and stable institutional funding.

The agreement projects that by 2025, accumulated deposits will exceed $3 trillion, and active lending will reach approximately $29 billion. Lending business growth will be slow but robust.

Main competitors:

• Fluid: A leading liquidity layer with a total value locked across chains of approximately $5 billion to $6 billion. It ranks third in the lending sector, second in monthly active users, and supports efficient DEX trading (trading volume of $150 billion and fees exceeding $23 million).
• Morpho Blue: With over $10 billion in deposits, it is the protocol with the largest deposit size on the Base chain, indicating a shift towards a modular, market-driven lending model.

5. The "Fat" RWA Protocol

Leader: BlackRock BUIDL

Assets under management: Approximately US$2.3 billion

Yield: Approximately 4% (Tokenized US Treasury Bonds)

Holders: Fewer than 100 (institutional investors)

Performance and match:

RWA's growth relies on scale and trust, rather than user numbers. BUIDL has expanded to seven blockchains and has been accepted as collateral by CEXs, marking the establishment of a structural bridge between TradeFi and on-chain finance.

Main competitors:

• Ondo Finance: With TVL exceeding $1 billion and MiCA approval, it solidifies its position as a leading crypto-native RWA distributor.

6. "Fat" LRT / Resettlement Layer

Leader: EigenLayer

Repledged assets: approximately US$12.4 billion

Annualized commission income: approximately US$70 million

Number of users: Approximately 300,000 to 400,000

Performance and match:

EigenLayer is a foundational restaking layer that generates revenue by renting out Ethereum's security to AVS. The launch of EigenCloud (EigenAI, EigenCompute) extends this to verifiable off-chain computing.

Main competitors:

• Ether.fi: Annualized revenue of approximately $100 million, actively repurchasing ETHFI, and achieving a strong consumer-facing monetization model through Cash.

7. "Fat" Aggregator/Route Layer

Leader: Jupiter

Annualized income: approximately US$12 million

DEX aggregator trading volume (30 days): Approximately $46 billion

Market share: Approximately 90% of Solana aggregator transaction volume.

Performance and match:

Aggregators profit from decision-making power. Jupiter captures value by controlling routing, pricing, and execution quality, and by intercepting spreads before liquidity providers.

Main competitors:

• COWSwap: With a cumulative trading volume of approximately $110 billion, it offers MEV protection, making it particularly suitable for institutional traders.

8. "Fat" Stablecoin Issuers

Leader: Tether (USDT)

Circulating supply: approximately US$185 billion

Annualized revenue: Over $10 billion

Treasury holdings: approximately $135 billion

Performance and match:

Tether is the most profitable entity in the crypto space. Stablecoin issuers generate profits from their liquidity pools through yields on government bonds, giving them a structural advantage over most protocols.

Main competitors:

• USDC (Circle): Supply of approximately $78 billion, growing rapidly but with low profit margins.
• Ethena USDe: With a supply of approximately $12 billion, it represents a challenger model driven by synthetic yields.

9. "Fat" Predicts the Market

Leader: Polymarket

Annualized income: (not disclosed)

Monthly trading volume: Approximately $1.5-2 billion (peaks during major events)

User count: Approximately 200,000-300,000 monthly active traders

Performance and match:

Prediction markets profit from attention and uncertainty. Their key structural advantage lies in information gravity. Liquidity concentrates where the probability is considered most accurate. Once this cycle of credibility is established, it becomes very difficult for challengers to build meaningful trading depth.

Polymarket's popularity stems not from consistently active users, but from its status as a global source of trending topics—a highly profitable form of attention.

Prediction markets represent a new "fat" layer:

• Not dependent on TVL
• No market directional fluctuations involved
• High cost flexibility during the event period
• It has strong narrative power (probably becoming headline news).

This makes them one of the few crypto applications that exhibit positive convexity in response to macroeconomic and political fluctuations.

Main competitors:

• Kalshi: Regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Kalshi supports U.S. fiat-based event trading (such as sports/politics), and its trading volume sometimes even surpasses Polymarket, attracting the attention of TradeFi, but it is currently lagging behind in crypto-native liquidity.

10. "Fat" MEV

Leader: Flashbots

Annualized MEV extraction: approximately $230 million

Cumulative MEV managed: Over $1.5 billion

Performance and match:

MEV is a hidden tax on the blockchain space. Flashbots has institutionalized the extraction and redistribution of MEV, making it a key infrastructure for Ethereum and Rollups.

Main competitors:

• Jito: Captured approximately 66% of Solana fees in Q1 2025 through MEV tips and BAM.
• Arbitrum: It has collected approximately $10 million in fees since its launch, indicating that MEV capitalization is shifting upstream.

Related reading: The "fat app" is dead; welcome to the era of "fat distribution"