FEESis what users pay to use the protocolREVENUEis the share of that which accrues to the protocol itself
FEES and the same multiple built on REVENUE can rank the same set of protocols in a completely different order.
Fee capture across protocols
- Capture varies by two orders of magnitude. Hyperliquid keeps about 80 cents of every dollar paid to it. Uniswap keeps two. Morpho keeps nothing, and its fees accrue entirely to lenders.
- The denominator decides the ranking. Uniswap and Aave generate almost identical fees, but on revenue Uniswap is 167.5x and Aave 13.7x. On fees they are 3.2x and 1.7x. A comp table is only meaningful once you say which line you are paying for.
- Morpho has no revenue multiple to compute. Guard the division rather than assuming every protocol has a fee switch turned on.
Whether the business is growing
The same call without thesum() gives the quarterly path, which is where the direction shows up:
Hyperliquid’s fees fell 39% across the year with revenue tracking them down at a steady ratio. Uniswap’s fell 48%, but its revenue went from nothing to a small figure as its fee switch came on, so the two are moving in opposite directions on the line a token holder is paid from.
granularity=QUARTER labels each bucket with the quarter’s first day, so Q3 2025 arrives as 2025-07-01. Equity fundamentals label by fiscal period end instead. See Equity comps if you are putting the two side by side.Per-user economics
FEES over DAU gives revenue per active user, the same unit economics question you would ask of a listed company:
FEES is a SUM and DAU is an AVERAGE, so a MONTH bucket gives a monthly fee total over an average daily user count. Divide the fees by the days in the month before dividing by users. July 2026:
Aave and Uniswap collected almost the same fees that month from user bases seventeen times apart. Ranking by users and ranking by fees per user give you two different pictures of the same three protocols.
For sector-wide rankings rather than a hand-picked basket, see Sector leaderboards.
