After the tide goes out: Which Web3 projects continue to make money

After the bubble bursts, what is the survival bottom line for encryption projects?

In an era where everything could tell a story and anything could be overvalued, cash flow didn't seem to be necessary. But now, it's different.

VCs are retreating, and liquidity is tightening. In such a market environment, whether one can make money and whether there is positive cash flow has become the first filter to test the fundamentals of projects.

In contrast, some other projects rely on stable income to weather the cycles. According to DeFiLlama data, in October 2025, the top three earning encryption projects can generate revenues of 688 million (Tether), 237 million (Circle), and 102 million (Hyperliquid) dollars in a month.

In this article, we want to talk about projects that have real cash flow. They mostly revolve around two things: one is trading, and the other is attention. The two essential sources of value in the business world are no exception in the cryptocurrency space.

Centralized Exchange: The Most Stable Revenue Model

In the cryptocurrency world, the fact that “exchanges are the most profitable” has never been a secret.

The main sources of income for exchanges include trading fees, listing fees, and so on. Take Binance as an example; its daily spot and contract trading volume has long accounted for 30% to 40% of the entire market. Even during the slowest market in 2022, the annual revenue was still 12 billion dollars, and during this bullish cycle, the revenue will only be more, not less. (Data from CryptoQuant)

In summary: as long as there are trades, the exchange can generate income.

Another company is Coinbase, as a listed company, its data disclosure is clearer. In the third quarter of 2025, Coinbase's revenue was $1.9 billion, with a net profit of $433 million. Trading revenue is the main source, contributing more than half, while the remaining revenue comes from subscription and service fees, among others. Other leading companies like Kraken and OKX are also steadily making profits, with Kraken reportedly having a revenue of around $1.5 billion in 2024.

The biggest advantage of these CEXs is that trading naturally generates income. Compared to many projects that are still worried about whether their business models can work, they are already making real money through service fees.

In other words, during this stage where storytelling is becoming increasingly difficult and hot money is dwindling, CEX is one of the few types of players that can survive solely on their own without financing.

On-chain projects: PerpDex, stablecoins, public chain

According to the data from DefiLlama as of November 27, 2025, the top ten on-chain protocols with the highest revenue in the past 30 days are shown in the figure.

It can be seen that, first and foremost, Tether and Circle firmly occupy the top positions. With the interest rate spread of U.S. Treasury bonds behind USDT and USDC, these two stablecoin issuers earned nearly $1 billion in just one month. Following closely is Hyperliquid, firmly established as the “most profitable derivatives protocol on-chain.” In addition, the rapid rise of Pumpfun once again validates the old logic that “trading coins is not as good as selling coins, and selling shovels is not as good as selling tools” still works in the encryption industry.

It is worth noting that dark horse projects like Axiom Pro and Lighter, although their overall revenue scale is not large, have already established a positive cash flow path.

2.1 PerpDex: Real Yield of On-Chain Protocol

This year, the most impressive PerpDex is Hyperliquid.

Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetual contract platform that uses an independent chain and has its own matching engine. Its explosion was quite sudden, completing a trading volume of $38.3 billion in just one month in August 2025, with revenue reaching $106 million. Additionally, the project uses 32% of its revenue to buy back and burn platform tokens. According to a report by @wublockchain12 yesterday, the Hyperliquid team unlocked 1.75 million HYPE ($60.4 million), with no external financing or selling pressure, and the protocol's revenue is used to buy back tokens.

For an on-chain project, this is already close to the revenue efficiency of a CEX. More importantly, Hyperliquid really earns money and then feeds it back into the token economic system, establishing a direct connection between protocol income and token value.

Let's talk about Uniswap again.

In the past few years, Uniswap has faced criticism for benefiting token holders without contributing, such as charging 0.3% on each transaction but giving it all to LPs, while UNI holders receive not a cent in income.

Until November 2025, Uniswap announced plans to launch a protocol fee sharing mechanism and use a portion of historical revenue to buy back and burn UNI tokens. According to estimates, if this mechanism had been implemented earlier, the funds available for burning in just the first ten months of this year could reach as high as $150 million. Upon the news, UNI surged directly by 40% on the same day. Although Uniswap's market share has dropped from a peak of 60% to 15%, this proposal could still reshape the fundamental logic of UNI. However, after this proposal was released, @EmberCN monitored that an investment institution in UNI, (, might be Variant Fund ), transferred millions of $UNI tokens into Coinbase Prime, suspected of inflating the price for selling.

Overall, the past model of DEX that relied on airdrop hype to drive up prices is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Only those projects that truly generate stable income and complete a business loop are likely to retain users.

( 2.2 Stablecoins and Public Chains: Earning by Lying on Interest

In addition to trading-related projects, there is also a batch of infrastructure projects continuously attracting capital. Among these, the most typical are stablecoin issuers and high-frequency used public chains.

Tether: The Giant of Continuous Money Printing

The company behind USDT, Tether, has a very simple revenue model: every time someone deposits 1 dollar in exchange for USDT, that money is used by Tether to buy low-risk assets such as government bonds and short-term notes to earn interest, which goes to themselves. With global interest rate hikes, Tether's earnings have also risen. In 2024, net profit reached 13.4 billion dollars, and it is expected to exceed 15 billion in 2025, approaching traditional financial giants like Goldman Sachs. @Phyrex_Ni recently also stated that Tether's rating has been downgraded but remains a cash cow, relying on over 130 billion in US Treasury bonds as collateral.

Although USDC issuer Circle has a slightly smaller circulation scale and net profit, its total revenue for the entire year of 2024 will also exceed 1.6 billion dollars, with 99% coming from interest income. It should be noted that Circle's profit margin is not as exaggerated as Tether's, partly due to revenue sharing from its collaboration with Coinbase. In simple terms, stablecoin issuers are like money printing machines; they do not rely on storytelling for financing, but rather on users' willingness to keep their money with them. In a bear market, such savings-type projects actually thrive. @BTCdayu also believes that stablecoins are a good business, printing money and collecting interest globally, while being optimistic about Circle as the king of passive income in stablecoins.

Public Chain: Relying on traffic rather than incentives for sustenance

Looking at the mainnet public chain, the most direct way to monetize is through Gas fees. The data in the image below is sourced from Nansen.ai:

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In the past year, if we only look at the total transaction fee revenue of public chains, we can see more clearly which chains have truly transformed into usable value. Ethereum's annual revenue was $739 million, still the main source of income, but it decreased by 71% year-on-year due to the impact of the Dencun upgrade and L2 traffic diversion. In contrast, Solana's annual revenue reached $719 million, an increase of 26% year-on-year, achieving a significant increase in user activity and interaction frequency driven by the Meme and AI Agent trends. Tron had a revenue of $628 million, an 18% year-on-year increase. Bitcoin's annual revenue was $207 million, mainly affected by the decline in the popularity of inscription transactions, showing a significant overall decline.

BNB Chain's annual revenue reached $264 million, a year-on-year increase of 38%, ranking first among mainstream public chains in growth rate. Although the revenue scale is still lower than that of ETH, SOL, and TRX, the growth in transaction volume and active addresses indicates that its on-chain use cases are expanding, and the user base is becoming more diverse. BNB Chain overall demonstrates strong user retention and genuine demand. This stable growth in revenue structure also provides clearer support for the continuous evolution of its ecosystem.

These public chains are like “water sellers”; no matter who is mining gold in the market, they will always need their water, electricity, and roads. Although these infrastructure projects may not have short-term explosive growth, they excel in stability and resistance to cycles.

Business Around KOL: Attention Can Also Be Monetized

If transaction and infrastructure are the overt business models, then the attention economy is the “hidden business” in the encryption world, such as KOL, Agency, and so on.

Since the beginning of this year, the encryption KOL has formed a center of attention traffic.

Active KOLs on X, Telegram, and YouTube leverage their personal influence to develop diversified income models: a series of traffic businesses including paid promotions, community subscriptions, and course monetization. According to industry rumors, mid-tier and above encryption KOLs can earn $10,000 a month from promotions. Meanwhile, audience expectations for content quality are also rising, so KOLs who can navigate through cycles are often those creators who have gained user trust through professionalism, judgment, or deep engagement. This has also, in an invisible way, propelled the content ecosystem to shuffle during bear markets, with the impatient exiting and the long-termists remaining.

It is worth noting the third layer of attention monetization, KOL round financing. This makes KOLs important participants in the primary market: acquiring project tokens at a discount price, undertaking traffic exposure tasks, in exchange for “early chips brought by influence,” this model directly bypasses VCs.

A complete set of matching services has also emerged around KOL itself. Agencies are beginning to play the role of traffic intermediaries. They match suitable KOLs for projects, and the entire process increasingly resembles an advertising placement system. If you are interested in the business models of KOL and agencies, you can refer to our previous long article “Unveiling the KOL Cycle: A Wealth Experiment Wrapped in Traffic” (https://x.com/BiteyeCN/status/1986748741592711374) to gain a deeper understanding of the real利益结构 behind it.

In summary, the attention economy is essentially a form of trust monetization, and trust becomes more scarce during bear markets, making the monetization threshold even higher.

Conclusion

Projects that can still maintain cash flow during the encryption winter mostly confirm the two cornerstones of “trading” and “attention.”

On one hand, whether it is a centralized or decentralized trading platform, as long as there is robust user trading behavior, they can generate continuous income through transaction fees. This direct business model allows them to be self-sufficient even when capital exits. On the other hand, KOLs focusing on capturing user attention monetize user value through advertising and services.

In the future, we may see more diverse models, but in any case, those projects that have accumulated real income during poor market conditions will have a better chance of leading new developments. In contrast, some projects that rely solely on storytelling and lack self-sustaining capabilities may eventually be ignored, even if they experience a short-term hype.