Small profit business? No, DeFi lending protocols are the underestimated "King of Value"

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Title: Why the DeFi Lending Moat Is Bigger Than You Think

Author: Silvio, Crypto Researcher

Compiled by: Dingdang, Odaily Planet Daily

As the market share of vaults and curators in the DeFi world continues to grow, the market is beginning to question: Are lending protocols gradually squeezing profit margins? Is lending no longer a good business?

But if we shift our perspective back to the entire on-chain credit value chain, the conclusion is quite the opposite. Lending protocols still hold the most solid moat in this value chain. We can quantify this with data.

On Aave and SparkLend, the interest paid by vaults to lending protocols actually exceeds the revenue generated by the vaults themselves. This fact directly challenges the mainstream narrative of “distribution is king.”

At least in the lending sector, distribution is not king.

Simply put: Aave earns more than the various vaults built on top of it, and even surpasses the asset issuers used for lending, such as Lido and Ether.fi.

To understand why, we need to break down the complete value chain of DeFi lending and, following the flow of capital and fees, reassess the value capture capabilities of each role.

Lending Value Chain Breakdown

The annualized revenue scale of the entire lending market has exceeded $100 million. This value is not generated by a single link but by a complex stack of components: the underlying settlement blockchain, asset issuers, capital lenders, the lending protocols themselves, and vaults responsible for distribution and strategy execution.

In previous articles, we mentioned that many current lending use cases originate from basis trading and liquidity mining opportunities, and we dissected the main strategic logic behind them.

So, who is truly “demanding” capital in the lending market?

I analyzed the top 50 wallet addresses on Aave and SparkLend and labeled the main borrowers.

1. The largest borrowers are vaults and strategy platforms like Fluid, Treehouse, Mellow, Ether.fi, Lido, etc. (which are also asset issuers). They hold the distribution capability toward end-users, helping users earn higher yields without managing complex cycles and risks themselves.

2. There are also large institutional capital providers, such as Abraxas Capital, deploying external capital into similar strategies. Their economic models are fundamentally very close to vaults.

But vaults are not the whole story. At least the following participant categories are involved in this chain:

· Users: deposit assets, seeking additional yield through vaults or strategy managers

· Lending protocols: provide infrastructure and liquidity matching, charging interest to borrowers and taking a certain percentage as protocol revenue

· Lenders: capital providers, who can be ordinary users or other vaults

· Asset issuers: most on-chain lending assets are backed by underlying assets that generate income themselves, some of which are captured by the issuers

· Blockchain network: the underlying “track” where all activities occur

Lending Protocols Earn More Than Downstream Vaults

Take Ether.fi’s ETH liquidity staking vault as an example. It is the second-largest borrower on Aave, with an outstanding loan of about $1.5 billion. This strategy is very typical:

· Deposit weETH (+2.9%)

· Borrow wETH (–2%)

· Vault charges a 0.5% platform management fee on TVL

Of Ether.fi’s total TVL, approximately $215 million is actual net liquidity deployed on Aave. This portion of TVL generates about $1.07 million annually in platform fee income for the vault.

Meanwhile, the strategy pays about $4.5 million annually in interest to Aave (calculated as: $1.5 billion borrowed × 2% borrow APY × 15% reserve factor).

Even in one of the largest and most successful cycle strategies in DeFi, the value captured by the lending protocol is still several times that of the vault.

Of course, Ether.fi is also the issuer of weETH, which directly creates demand for weETH itself.

But even when combining the vault’s strategy revenue and the issuer’s revenue, the economic value created by the lending layer (Aave) remains higher.

In other words, lending protocols are the most valuable increment in the entire stack.

We can perform similar analyses on other common vaults:

Fluid Lite ETH: 20% performance fee + 0.05% exit fee, no platform management fee. Borrow $1.7 billion wETH from Aave, paying about $33 million in interest, of which roughly $5 million goes to Aave, and Fluid’s own income approaches $4 million.

Mellow’s strETH charges a 10% performance fee, with a borrowing scale of $165 million and a TVL of only about $37 million. Again, we see that in terms of TVL, Aave captures more value than the vault itself.

Let’s look at another example: SparkLend, the second-largest lending protocol on Ethereum, where Treehouse is a key participant running an ETH cycle strategy:

· TVL about $34 million

· Borrowed $133 million

· Charges performance fees only on marginal yields above 2.6%

As a lending protocol, SparkLend’s ability to capture value in terms of TVL surpasses that of the vault.

The pricing structure of vaults greatly impacts their own capture of value; but for lending protocols, their income depends more on the nominal size of loans, which is relatively stable.

Even when shifting to dollar-denominated strategies, although leverage is lower, higher interest rates often offset this effect. I do not believe the conclusion will fundamentally change.

In relatively closed markets, more value may flow to curators, such as Stakehouse Prime Vault (26% performance fee, incentivized by Morpho). But this is not the final state of Morpho’s pricing mechanism; curators are also engaging in distribution collaborations with other platforms.

Lending Protocols vs Asset Issuers

So the question is: is it better to do Aave or Lido?

This question is more complex than comparing vaults because staked assets not only generate yields themselves but also indirectly create stablecoin interest income for protocols through the lending market. We can only make approximate estimates.

Lido holds about $4.42 billion in assets in the core Ethereum market, supporting lending positions with an annualized performance fee income of about $11 million.

These positions roughly support ETH and stablecoin lending proportionally. With the current net interest margin (NIM) of about 0.4%, the corresponding lending income is approximately $17 million, which is already significantly higher than Lido’s direct revenue (and this is at a historically low NIM level).

The True Moat of Lending Protocols

If we only compare with traditional financial deposit profit models, DeFi lending protocols might seem like a low-profit industry. But this comparison overlooks where the real moat lies.

In the on-chain credit system, the value captured by lending protocols exceeds that of downstream distribution layers and also surpasses upstream asset issuers overall.

Individually, lending might seem like a thin-margin business; but within the complete credit stack, it is the layer with the strongest value capture relative to all other participants—vaults, issuers, distribution channels.