After the tide goes out: which Web3 projects are still making money?

Author: Biteye Core Contributor Viee

What is the survival baseline for cryptocurrency projects after the bubble bursts?

In that era where everything could tell a story and 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 assess the fundamentals of a project.

In contrast, some other projects rely on stable income to weather the cycles. According to DeFiLlama data, in October 2025, the top three crypto projects by revenue can generate $688 million (Tether), $237 million (Circle), and $102 million (Hyperliquid) respectively 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 most essential sources of value in the business world are no exception in the cryptocurrency space.

01 Centralized Exchange: The Most Stable Income Model

In the crypto 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, etc. Take Binance as an example; its daily spot and futures trading volume has long accounted for 30-40% of the entire market. Even in the quietest market of 2022, its annual revenue still reached $12 billion, and during the current bull market, the revenue will only be higher, not lower. (Data from CryptoQuant)

In summary, as long as there are people trading, the exchange can generate revenue.

Another company is Coinbase, which, as a publicly traded company, has clearer data disclosures. In the third quarter of 2025, Coinbase had a revenue of $1.9 billion and a net profit of $433 million. Trading revenue is the main source, contributing more than half, while the remaining income comes from subscription and service revenues, among others. Other leading companies like Kraken and OKX are also steadily making profits, with Kraken reportedly generating around $1.5 billion in revenue in 2024.

The biggest advantage of these CEXs is that trading naturally generates income. Compared to many projects that are still worrying about whether their business models can work, they are already charging for services in a tangible way.

In other words, during this stage where storytelling is becoming increasingly difficult and hot money is becoming scarcer, CEXs are one of the few players that can survive on their own without the need for financing.

02 On-chain projects: PerpDex, stablecoins, public chains

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

It can be seen that, first and foremost, Tether and Circle are firmly at the top. Thanks to the yield spread from US Treasury bonds behind USDT and USDC, these two stablecoin issuers earned nearly $1 billion in just one month. Following closely is Hyperliquid, which firmly holds the position of the “most profitable on-chain derivatives protocol.” Additionally, the rapid rise of Pumpfun further 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 crypto industry.

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

2.1 PerpDex: The Real Earnings of On-Chain Protocols

This year, the most impressive PerpDex is Hyperliquid.

Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetual contract platform that operates on an independent chain with built-in matching. Its explosion was quite sudden, completing a trading volume of $38.3 billion in just one month, August 2025, with revenue reaching $10.6 million. In addition, 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 and no selling pressure, as protocol revenue is used to repurchase tokens.

For an on-chain project, this is already close to the revenue efficiency of a CEX. More critically, Hyperliquid is genuinely making money and then reinvesting it back into the token economy, establishing a direct connection between protocol revenue and token value.

Let's talk about Uniswap again.

In recent years, Uniswap has been criticized for benefiting token holders without contributing, as it charges 0.3% on each transaction but gives it all to LPs, while UNI holders receive not a penny in income.

Until November 2025, Uniswap announced plans to launch a protocol fee-sharing mechanism and use part of its historical revenue to repurchase and burn UNI tokens. According to estimates, if this mechanism had been implemented earlier, the funds available for burning could have reached as high as $150 million in just the first ten months of this year. The news caused UNI to surge 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 the release of this proposal, @EmberCN monitored that an investment institution holding UNI (, possibly Variant Fund), transferred millions of $UNI ($2708 ) to Coinbase Prime, suspected to be an effort to raise prices for selling.

Overall, the past DEX model that relied on airdrop hype to pump prices is becoming increasingly unviable. Only projects that can genuinely generate stable income and complete a business loop are likely to retain users.

2.2 Stablecoins and Public Chains: Earning Passive Income through Interest

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

Tether: The Giant of Continuous Money Printing

The company behind USDT, Tether, has a very simple revenue model: whenever 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, with the interest going to themselves. With global interest rates rising, Tether's earnings have also increased significantly. In 2024, net profit reached 13.4 billion dollars, and it is expected to exceed 15 billion in 2025, nearing traditional financial giants like Goldman Sachs. @Phyrex_Ni also recently published that Tether's rating has been downgraded but it remains a cash cow, relying on US Treasury bonds to earn over 130 billion in collateral.

Although the issuer of USDC, Circle, has a slightly smaller circulation scale and net profit, its total revenue for the entire year of 2024 is expected to 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 partnership with Coinbase. In simple terms, stablecoin issuers are like money printers; they don't rely on storytelling for funding, but rather on users' willingness to keep their money with them. In bear markets, such savings-type projects tend to thrive. @BTCdayu also believes that stablecoins are a good business, printing money while collecting interest worldwide, and is optimistic about Circle being the king of easy profits in the stablecoin space.

Public chain: relies on traffic for sustenance, not on incentives.

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

In the past year, if we only look at the total transaction fee revenue of public chains, we can more clearly see which chains have truly converted into usage value. Ethereum's annual revenue was $739 million, still the main source of income, but it dropped 71% year-on-year due to the Dencun upgrade and L2 traffic diversion. In contrast, Solana's annual revenue reached $719 million, up 26% year-on-year, significantly improving user activity and interaction frequency driven by the Meme and AI Agent craze. Tron earned $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 trading, with a significant overall drop.

BNB Chain's annual revenue reached $264 million, a year-on-year increase of 38%, ranking first in growth among mainstream public chains. Although its revenue scale is still lower than that of ETH, SOL, and TRX, the growth in its transaction volume and active addresses indicates that its on-chain use cases are expanding, and its user structure is becoming more diverse. Overall, BNB Chain shows strong user retention and real demand. This stable growth in revenue structure also provides a 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 potential, they excel in stability and are counter-cyclical.

03 The Business Around KOL: Attention Can Be Monetized

If trading and infrastructure are the overt business models, then the attention economy is the “hidden business” in the crypto world, such as KOLs, agencies, and so on.

Since the beginning of this year, crypto KOLs have formed a center of attention traffic.

Active influencers on X, Telegram, and YouTube are leveraging their personal influence to develop diversified income models: a series of traffic businesses ranging from paid promotions, community subscriptions, to monetizing courses. Industry rumors suggest that mid-tier and above crypto KOLs can earn $10,000 a month through promotions. At the same time, audience expectations for content quality are also rising; therefore, KOLs who can navigate through cycles are often those creators who have gained user trust through professionalism, judgment, or deep engagement. This has, in turn, invisibly promoted a reshuffling of the content ecosystem during bear markets, with the impatient exiting and long-term thinkers remaining.

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

A whole set of matching services has also emerged around KOL itself. Agencies have begun to play the role of traffic intermediaries. They match suitable KOLs for projects, and the whole process increasingly resembles an advertising placement system. If you are interested in the business models of KOLs and agencies, you can refer to our previous long article “Revealing the KOL Cycle: A Wealth Experiment Enveloped by Traffic” to gain a deeper understanding of the real interest structure behind it.

In short, the attention economy is essentially a monetization of trust, and trust becomes even scarcer in bear markets, making the monetization threshold even higher.

04 Conclusion

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

On one hand, whether centralized or decentralized trading platforms, as long as there are stable user trading behaviors, they can obtain continuous income through transaction fees. This direct business model allows them to remain self-sufficient even when capital exits. On the other hand, KOLs who focus on capturing user attention monetize user value through advertisements and services.

In the future, we may see more diverse models, but regardless, those projects that have accumulated real income during market downturns will have a better chance of leading new developments. In contrast, some projects that rely solely on storytelling and lack self-sustaining capabilities may find themselves ignored in the end, even if they temporarily flip through short-term hype.