A place where both yield and points farmooors can enjoy the treat!

It's time for Yield Collective No.62

Bring your wallet, let’s eat!

1) Apyx apyUSD Preferred-Stock Yield

Apyx is a simple way to access on-chain preferred-stock income.

apyUSD has been running a 13.77% trailing yield from Strategy’s STRC dividends, while aptUSD sits closer to 3.5% from Treasuries 👇

2) Aero USDC/MSTRc Allocation Yield

An sAERO allocation into the USDC/MSTRc pool on Base since launch could be a juicy option.

The APR has hovered in the mid-to-high teens, recently printing 19.3%.

Volume on the pair has stayed active, which is what feeds the fees 👇

3) Meteora MET Staking Extra APR

Some notes on Meteora Expert Contributor allocation and the staking side. Staking the MET allocation is currently adding roughly 25% APR paid in USDC on top of the position.

Simple extra layer if you already hold the token 👇

4) Looputo Origin Season Automated Looping

Here’s an opportunity on Looputo’s Origin Season for automated looping across Aave, Morpho and Spark.

Fixed rewards sit at 15-17.5% on LST equity and 10% on yield-bearing stables, paid in WETH or USDC, with LOP points on top for the 10% LPT allocation 👇

5) Delta-Neutral SOL Funding Setup

Here’s a walk through on a long-SOL on Cardboard/short-SOL on Phoenix setup at 8x.

Phoenix funding around 15-16% produces roughly 60% APR on the paired position before fees, though liquidation sits near an 11% move on either leg 👇

6) Low-Risk Stable Yields Roundup

Here’re three lower-risk stablecoin yield options:

• Sky’s GROVE vault at 7.87% on USDS

• Aave V4 Base USDC supply at 5.4% against Coinbase tokenised stocks

• Tenor’s USDC vs cbBTC market at ~14% (base plus incentives)

All framed around audited protocols and limited liquidation exposure 👇

7) SpringX Vault Yields on Monad

SpringX Finance vaults on Monad are currently screening USDC at 40.32%, AUSD at 37.02% and the new cbBTC market at 32.71%

More opportunities await 👇

8) Keno’s 100th Farm Smart Roundup

Standouts include Boros locked at 42.69% fixed APR, a PT-reUSD loop running ~28% at moderate leverage, Kamino pairs up to 28.78%, and Reflect’s amplified syrupUSDC at 23.6%.

Lower-risk names like Maple and Jupiter sit in the mid-single to low-double digits 👇

It’s been a rollercoaster week in crypto:

• What it takes for $100M in Ethena buybacks

• Recognition for tradexyz from tradfi

• Binance faces a $6.3B+ exploit

• Questioning the winner of the crypto options supercycle

It’s time to dig in 👇

1) What It Takes For USDe To Fund $100M+ Of ENA Buybacks A Year

Ethena’s fee switch only starts buying ENA once the 14-day USDe supply average clears $7.5B.

It is still some ways away, and this piece sizes what it could buy at $10B and $15B while mapping the two levers most likely to close the gap 👇

2) Trade[XYZ] x ICE: Bringing Hyperliquid to TradFi

ICE is taking a stake in tradexyz and will operate its regulated US markets on Hyperliquid via HIP-3, aiming to offer 24/7 perps on crypto, equities, commodities and FX through FCMs.

It is the clearest validation yet that a major exchange operator would rather build on HyperCore than force its own stack into continuous trading 👇

3) Binance hack: $6.3B loss. How is this even possible?

A compromised engineer laptop appears to have let attackers submit valid signatures and drain hot wallets across chains, with Binance estimating $6.3B affected and roughly half frozen.

Can post-incident reserves still fully back customer balances once withdrawals resume? 👇

4) Nvidia’s Buyers Need Nvidia’s Money to Keep Buying Nvidia Chips

CoreWeave buys Nvidia chips, Nvidia owns part of CoreWeave, and Nvidia has agreed to take capacity if outside renters do not show up.

The circularity is fine until the timing gap between GPU delivery and end-user revenue gets too long 👇

5) How much for how much can you borrow at a fixed rate (without talking to anyone) by Christmas?

You can currently borrow about $55M at a fixed rate against BTC and ETH collateral maturing by late Dec, and nearly 80% of that capacity sits in one new Morpho market.

This maps the actual yield curve and asks what finally makes fixed-rate borrowing stick this cycle 👇

6) Who Builds on Ethereum, the Companies Behind the Largest RWA Chain

Ethereum carries $16.75B of distributed real-world assets, more than the next four chains combined. BlackRock, JPMorgan, WisdomTree and the big gold tokens all launch here first.

The L2s are where the next wave of smaller issuers is landing 👇

7) Crypto Market Makers: What Makes Market Making Legitimate?

Korea’s Digital Asset Basic Act is the first real chance to separate actual liquidity providers from the volume farms that borrowed the name.

Most of the pain still comes from undisclosed issuer contracts, not the job itself 👇

In case you missed it…

Will We Have A Crypto Options Supercycle?

On-chain options just posted their strongest premium quarter on record even though notional volume is still well below the 2024 peak.

Will the venues that already hold traders’ collateral end up owning the flow once perps and apps start offering options next door? 👇

In brief: On-chain options just had their strongest quarter yet by the measure that counts. This piece looks at why the first wave of DeFi options faded, what has changed underneath this one, and why the venues that already hold traders’ collateral rather than the one with the deepest book today might have an edge.

As much as I would like to simplify the answer with a ‘Yes’, the history and current landscape shows that it is not that simple.

Here is something odd about crypto options. The biggest quarter on-chain options have ever had, measured by trading volume, was not this year. It was the first three months of 2024.

The quarter that just ended traded far less and paid far more:

• Q1 2024: $31.1 billion in notional volume and $52.12 million in premium. Buyers paid about 0.17 cents for each dollar of exposure.

• Q3 2026: $8.79 billion in notional volume and $193.09 million in premium. Buyers paid about 2.20 cents for each dollar of exposure.

Notional is the face value of the contracts that changed hands. Premium is what people actually paid to take on the risk. The first quarter had three and a half times the volume. The second had nearly four times the money paid for real exposure.

The second quarter was the boom, and premium is the measure I’ll hold every supercycle claim in this piece to. On-chain options have had a headline boom before, and it unwound. This one stands on a sturdier base, and I’m less sure that today’s leader is the venue that ends up owning its flow once the rest of crypto comes looking for it.

Record Premium On One Dominant Venue

Derive, the largest on-chain options venue, just had its biggest quarter on record. According to the on-chain data and from research firms like Alea Research:

• Notional: $7.45 billion in Q3 2026, up 89.6% on Q2 and 1.4 times everything Derive traded in 2025

• Premium across all on-chain venues: $194.1 million, up 37.9% on the quarter

• Cost of exposure on Derive: 2.35 cents per dollar, down from 3.16 cents in Q2

Traders got roughly twice the exposure and paid about a third more for it. There are two ways to read that. They may be buying cheaper contracts further from the current price, which pump up volume without carrying much risk. Or market makers may simply be competing harder and quoting tighter.

Regardless, the premium is hard to fake, and has grown 3.8 times in a year, from $50.42 million in Q3 2025 to $193.09 million in Q3 2026 (per DefiLlama).

Nearly all of that premium lands in one place:

• Derive held up to 92.4% of on-chain premium in Oct 2026, up from 53.0% in Q1 2025, after six consecutive quarters of share gains.

• Aevo, the nearest rival, held 2.8%.

• Everyone else, including Paradex and Hypercall (Synapse Protocol), shared the remaining 6.8%.

Within crypto options as a whole, the on-chain market is still a side room. Of the $44.7 billion in open interest across the five venues that publish it on 1 October 2026:

• Deribit: 78.2%. Coinbase closed its $2.9 billion cash-and-stock acquisition of it in August 2025.

• OKX, Bybit and Binance combined: 18.7%.

• Derive: 3.1%.

Deribit’s book alone is 25.3 times the size of the on-chain leader’s.

The Q3 number that stayed with me most had nothing to do with crypto assets. Hypercall, an options venue built on Hyperliquid, set a monthly record of $536 million in notional, and its most popular product is options on the S&P 500. People are coming on-chain to trade options on things crypto venues never used to offer.

Which raises an obvious question: why didn’t this demand show up the first time on-chain options had their moment?

The First Wave Parked Capital

At the end of 2021, on-chain options looked like one of DeFi’s busiest corners with $637.08 million locked in options protocols in Q4 2021, still the highest the category has ever reached.

What was that money actually doing?

Most of that parked money sat in vaults that did one thing on repeat. Ribbon’s theta vaults are the clearest example. Each week a vault sold out-of-the-money calls or puts against everything deposited, with strikes set around 10 delta, and auctioned them off. Depositors collected the premium as yield and carried the loss when an option they had sold expired in the money. Ribbon notes that its first auction format let a single low bidder set the price for the whole auction, which is why it later moved to Paradigm’s blind, all-or-nothing auctions.

The venues for actually trading options had the opposite problem. They needed capital they could not get. A 2020 review by Mechanism Capital laid out the constraints:

• Opyn required sellers to post the full strike value as collateral, with no portfolio margin, and had about $2 million in open interest a few months after launch.

• Hegic set its implied volatility by hand, through a parameter that had to be manually updated, which left room for arbitrage against other venues.

• Both pushed losses onto liquidity providers, through time decay and arbitrage on Opyn’s Uniswap pools and through in-the-money expiries for Hegic’s pool.

Derive (prev. Lyra), attempted to fix this: an AMM that could both buy and sell options, priced off a volatility surface and delta-hedged through Synthetix. It still asked liquidity providers to stand in as the counterparty to every trade.

The market did not survive the bear. Friktion, a Solana options vault protocol that peaked above $160 million in total value locked in the first half of 2022, closed its app to new activity in January 2023, citing a tough market for DeFi growth. By July 2023, Derive’s own V2 proposal was blunt about what had gone wrong across the sector: on-chain options lacked the performance and margining of centralised venues, and usability problems kept professional traders away.

None of this says the demand was missing. $637 million of deposits says people wanted options exposure badly enough to lock up capital for it. The products just routed that capital into the most passive possible trade, selling volatility on a weekly timer, while the venues built for active trading could not offer the capital efficiency traders were used to elsewhere. Which brings us to what actually changed.

Margin And Perp Hedging Fixed What Broke The First Wave

The easy story would be that regulators opened the door. They did open one, but not for on-chain venues.

Coinbase closed its $2.9 billion cash-and-stock purchase of Deribit in August 2025, and in May 2026 CFTC guidance let Coinbase Financial Markets connect US clients to options on Deribit, starting with institutional clients.

On the on-chain side, Hyperliquid and Phantom were still asking the CFTC in July 2026 for a framework built for on-chain derivatives, arguing that rules designed for traditional intermediaries were holding adoption back.

On-chain options grew WITHOUT new permission and that makes the growth more interesting, because it has to be explained by what the products themselves now do.

3 changes stand out:

1. Margin that treats a portfolio as a portfolio. Opyn asked sellers to lock the full strike value. The then Derive’s V2 design, proposed in July 2023, introduced a portfolio margin risk manager that sizes collateral by stress-testing the whole account against price and volatility shocks, alongside cross margin and multi-asset collateral. A hedged position no longer ties up capital as if it were naked.

2. Order books instead of pools. The first wave asked liquidity providers to be the counterparty to every trade. Lyra V2 moved to an order matcher running on its own rollup, with gasless trading through relayers, so professional market makers quote directly against traders. The liquidity provider who absorbed the losses in 2021 is no longer standing in the middle.

3. Perps as the hedging rail. This is the change I think matters most for what comes next. In September, a single S&P 500 options trade on Hypercall led market makers to delta-hedge $14.8 million in Hyperliquid perps. Hypercall’s founder, Jake Sylvestre, points to shared margin as a core feature: the same collateral can back an option and its hedge, so the trader does not split capital between two venues.

The third change also rewires the incentives. When the hedge lives on the same chain, in the same margin system, the deepest perp market becomes the natural home for options market makers.

In 2021, an options venue had to bootstrap its own liquidity from depositors. In 2026, it can borrow the liquidity of the perp venue next door.

That actually raises another question for the first wave of on-chain options. If options depend on the perp market underneath them: who holds the stronger hand - the venue with the deepest options book, or the venue that already holds the perps, the collateral and the users?

Derive Owns The Depth, But Perps Own The Users

Derive has earned its position.

6 straight quarters of premium share gains do not happen by accident, and its own weekly data shows what kind of business it has become.

Comparing the first weeks of the data (from mid-April 2026) with September:

• Weekly traders: up from an average of 714 to 1,306

• Average options trade: up from $50,747 to $114,471

• Record week (from 20 September): $1.35 billion in options notional across 12,153 trades, from 1,485 traders on the whole platform

Derive’s growth came more from bigger tickets than from more people. It looks like a venue that professional desks and large traders have settled into, and that kind of flow tends to stay where the depth is.

The perp venues operate on a different scale entirely (per Token Terminal):

• Hyperliquid: 215,943 weekly active users on average in September 2026, counting addresses that made a fee-paying transaction, and $718.26 billion in perps volume in Q3 2026

• Lighter: $119.82 billion in perps volume in Q3 2026

• For scale: Hyperliquid’s Q3 perps volume was 96.4 times Derive’s Q3 options notional

The user counts are not measured the same way, since Derive counts traders on its platform and Token Terminal counts fee-paying addresses, so I would not lean on an exact ratio. The order of magnitude is the point. One venue has the options depth. The other two have the traders, their collateral, and their habits.

Both perp venues have started moving into options, and both are starting in the same place:

• At TOKEN2049 in early October, founder Jeff Yan said options would be the platform’s next key product focus, designed so traders can hedge spot and perp positions on the same order book

• Lighter is now supporting binary options, and will look to expand its options’ suite

Starting with binaries looks like a compromise next to Derive’s multi-leg structures. I read this differently. A binary is a digital option: a fixed payout, a known maximum loss, and no need to understand the Greeks.

There are bonus points for familiarity - it is the version of an option that a perp trader can use on day one without learning a new product, opening a new wallet or moving a dollar. For the first cohort of options users, that matters more than depth on the strikes professionals trade.

Depth still matters for size. A fund rolling a large volatility position needs tight spreads across many strikes and expiries, and binaries do not give it that. But depth can be built over time. The chances of hundreds of thousands of funded accounts being built quickly by an options venue on its own is a tough feat.

For DRV holders, the outcome is not abstract. Derive allocates 50% of protocol fees to weekly buybacks, and after its 89th, the DAO had bought back 28,358,307 DRV in total. Every buyback is funded by the flow the perp venues are now reaching for.

The Supercycle Spurred By Existing Apps

In traditional markets, options are not a separate destination. A trader buys them from the same brokerage account that holds their shares, funded by the same cash. And it is a big business: the Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) cleared 15.2 billion US options contracts in 2025, 24.4% more than the year before.

On-chain options are moving in that direction, and the Hypercall trade from September shows who gets paid along the way. One S&P 500 option led to $14.8 million of hedging on Hyperliquid perps. Hyperliquid did not list that option, collect its premium or win that trader, and it still got the volume. If Hyperliquid builds options itself, it collects the premium and the hedge. If others build on top of it, it still collects the hedge. Either way, the deepest perp book ends up sitting underneath the options market.

That is why I am bullish on on-chain options while staying unsure that today’s leader takes the prize. Q3 showed that people will pay real premium on-chain, 3.8 times what they paid a year earlier, and that they will use it to trade things crypto never offered before. The first wave had demand and nowhere good to put it. This one has the plumbing, and the venues that hold the collateral are building the front door.

The incumbents are pursuing the same strategy. Coinbase says options will reach eligible users in its app from late October, and a rebuilt Coinbase Pro trading spot, perps, options and equities returns by year-end. The contest is no longer on-chain venues against Deribit. Every venue that already holds a trader’s balance, on-chain or not, is racing to put options next to it.

The tests are concrete.

• Can Hyperliquid’s options attract enough sellers to keep spreads tight?

• Does that flow stay inside its margin system, or still route to Derive and Deribit for size?

• Does Derive’s premium share hold above 90% once the perp venues offer options?

If the answers lean the way I expect, the options supercycle will not announce itself. It will arrive quietly, through metrics that keep climbing and an options button that appears in apps traders already use, and most of them will not notice until it is already here.

This article is purely for informational purposes only and does not construe any buy/sell advice. Always DYOR.

If it was useful, subscribe for more insights or guides which I write to show where crypto is heading towards.

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A place where both yield and points farmooors can enjoy the treat!

It's time for Yield Collective No.61

Bring your wallet, let’s eat!

1) DeFi Yield Pool Roundup

Here, put together is a short list of active pools while TVL keeps climbing.

Notable stables include USDC on Vesu (Starknet) at 5.73% supply APR, Rhea Finance USDC on NEAR at 9.86% APY, and infiniFi liUSD at 9.03%.

Ensuro’s eUSDSr insurance pool sits higher at ~20.9% APY if the risk fits 👇

2) Delta-Neutral weETH + Extended Short

Here’s a delta-neutral setup → loop weETH on Morpho then short the same notional ETH on Extended.

Combined it targets roughly 20.7% APY with the short’s funding and vault yield offsetting price risk 👇

3) Strata srUSDe / jrUSDe Fixed Rates on Pendle

There’s a new Feb 2027 Strata Markets after the Oct 22 maturity.

srUSDe PT is fixing around 4.90% APY (senior, protected) while jrUSDe sits at 4.55% fixed with higher underlying 👇

4) weETH Loop on Unichain via Euler

You can do a weETH loop on Unichain using Euler.

Base weETH yield is ~2.28%; looping against WETH can push ROE up to 19.96% at max leverage (~14x).

Liquidity is still modest at under $900k so size accordingly 👇

5) Hastra Ecosystem Yield Snapshot

Here’s a current mapping of Hastra yields ahead of Mezzanine’s first vault.

Base rates sit at 6.76% (SMB), 10.41% (AUTO) and 6.15% (PRIME).

Levered options range higher:

• AUTO/wYLDS fixed borrow on Kamino at 25% APY

• Morpho AUTO/USDC at 59.6% (thin liquidity)

• Exponent junior AUTO at 18%

6) Bleap EUR Vault (EUR option)

Spotted a Bleap addition among early yield spots this week.

The EUR vault on Arbitrum runs around 3% yield via KPK/Monerium/Morpho.

Lower than the aggressive stable setups on the same list, but simpler UX if you specifically want euro exposure 👇

7) RNT Lend USDC on Polygon (Real Estate Collateral)

RNT Protocol’s Lend’s USDC market on Polygon -is paying ~9.5% APY with $30M+ size on Aave V3 rails.

Yield comes from borrowers posting tokenised real estate (Reental) as collateral rather than emissions 👇

8) PendleLoop for Tokenised Stocks

The new PendleLoop feature that lets you auto-loop long/short on tokenised stocks (MAG7, BTC, ETH available). Free until end of year.

More directional leverage than pure stable yield - watch for the liquidation price if you max it 👇

What happens when emissions are drastically cut?

This week we dive into that and a few others:

• State of Robinhood

• Material changes on Paper (pun intended)

• Difficulties for BTCfi to take off

• Credit’s cracking signs

You’re in for a treat 👇

1) One User, Many Licenses: How Super Apps Are Rethinking Identity

A user can buy bitcoin, a tokenised stock, a NASDAQ perp and a prediction market ticket without ever leaving one app. Behind that single session sit four product lines, four regulators and four different licenses.

This walks through why “who is this person” is no longer the hard question 👇

2) Is Robinhood Chain Dead?

Network fees collapsed more than 99% from the September peak, yet the USDG vault still holds roughly $540M, tokenised stocks sit near $150M, and memecoins still drive more than half of spot volume.

Can Lighter and Arcus can keep traders after their points programmes end, or whether the chain is simply waiting for the next primitive that pulls flow the way stock-memecoin pairs did? 👇

3) Why Papertrade Won’t Let its Token Trade

Papertrade told holders they cannot transfer PAPER for the foreseeable future because a liquid token turns into a short that can pay for an attack on the shared house pool.

Here we see the math that made the call rational, the farmers who are now stuck holding a slow rebate, and why every other house-pool exchange will face the same choice the moment someone lists a perp on their reward token 👇

4) The Tokenised Carry Trade

Tokenised assets start to see real demand once you can loop them the same way people already loop stETH or sUSDe.

Here are the attributes that decide whether an asset is actually usable as collateral or just a high headline yield that lenders will not touch 👇

5) BNB Chain Q3 Token Holder Report

Tokenised-equity trading on BNB Chain hit roughly $25.6B in Q3, 11x the prior quarter, and those pairs briefly made up nearly a third of spot DEX volume.

The chain ended with more tokenised-equity supply than any other, while daily active addresses still fell.

Which parts are turning into actual flow? 👇

6) Bitcoin Yield, Decomposed

This piece breaks every return above zero into five sources, each with a different payer and a different risk, then shows why a named borrower paying in WBTC with first-loss capital is a different product from a temporary incentive campaign advertising 10%.

Worth reading before you chase the next bitcoin yield number 👇

7) Credit is starting to crack at the bottom

Credit spreads are already sorting AI borrowers by balance-sheet strength, and the next move in BBB spreads matters more for crypto than the stock index does 👇

In case you missed it…

Pancakeswap: The Flip Side Of A 69% Emissions Cut

A proposal that cuts CAKE emissions by 69% would slow net deflation by more than half, because it hands the V3 fees that funded most of the burn to liquidity providers.

The arithmetic shows where the burn actually comes from and changes what holding CAKE means 👇

In brief: PancakeSwap’s Flip proposal cuts CAKE emissions by 69%, yet it would slow CAKE’s deflation by more than half, because it hands the V3 fees that fund most of the burn to LPs. This piece breaks down where the burn really comes from, what deflation survives the change, and the 2.7x jump in volume the treasury needs to break even.

A proposal that cuts a token’s daily emissions by 69% should make that token scarcer, faster. On the last 7 weeks of burn data, this one would do the opposite: the pace at which supply shrinks would fall to less than half of what it is today.

That arithmetic sits underneath The Flip, the tokenomics proposal PancakeSwap’s core team (The Kitchen) opened for forum discussion on 14 October. Most of the coverage filed it as another step in CAKE’s deflation story, because the emissions cut is the number that fits in a headline. The other half of the proposal moves the largest source of CAKE burns to liquidity providers and the treasury, and it arrives at a moment when PancakeSwap’s trading volume is 88% below where it stood a year ago.

I think the trade is defensible, and I also think it changes what CAKE is.

Getting there needs 4 pieces of data:

• Where the burn actually comes from

• What the take rate becomes

• How much deflation survives

• How much volume has to come back to pay for it

  ---

Low Emissions Kept CAKE Deflationary Through An 88% Volume Drop

CAKE supply peaked at 391.56 million in September 2023. By the start of September 2026 it stood at about 334 million, 14.5% lower, and in mid-September PancakeSwap marked 37 consecutive months of net deflation.

Governance tightened the ceiling twice along the way, cutting the max. supply from 750 million down all the way to 400 million in a January 2026 Snapshot vote.

The streak does look like strength but consideration should also be given to the underlying business figures.

30D windows tell the story:

• 30 days to 18 October 2025: $181 billion in trading volume, $204 million in fees and $67.0 million in protocol revenue.

• 30 days to 18 October 2026: $21.5 billion in volume, $18.6 million in fees and $6.07 million in revenue.

Part of 2025’s volume was thinner than the headline figure suggests.

June 2025 printed $264 billion of volume but only $68 million of fees, roughly 2.6 basis points per dollar traded, against about 8.7 basis points in the latest 30D.

Even so, fees have fallen by nine-tenths, and the streak held through it for a mechanical reason: post-veCAKE emissions run at 22,500 CAKE a day, or 157,500 a week, and the weakest of the last seven weekly reports still burned 480,000.

The market priced the fall in revenue far more gently than the fall itself. CAKE traded at $2.58 on 1 October 2025 and $2.19 on 18 October 2026, a 15% decline against a 91% drop in 30D revenue.

V3 Pools Fund 56% Of The CAKE Burn

The Flip describes V2 as PancakeSwap’s main burn engine, and most third-party summaries repeat the line. The weekly reports say otherwise.

Across the 7 reports published between 18 August and 6 October, PancakeSwap burned 4.43 million CAKE:

• V3 pools: 2.50 million CAKE, or 56.3% of the total, swinging between 251,000 and 629,000 a week.

• V2 pools: 1.60 million CAKE, or 36.1%.

• Prediction markets, perpetuals and other products: 199,000 CAKE, or 4.5%.

• Infinity pools: 136,500 CAKE, or 3.1%.

V2 is the steadier line here, and that is exactly the problem with leaning on it. Its weekly burn sat at 250,000 to 254,000 through late August and early September, then fell to between 188,000 and 217,000 over the three reports from late September onward. V2’s fee routing is hard-coded, with 23% of swap fees going to the burn, so V2’s contribution only grows if traders keep choosing the oldest pools on the exchange.

The Flip leaves v2’s burn untouched and redirects the v3 fees that destroyed more than half of all CAKE across these seven weeks.

The Flip Cuts PancakeSwap’s Take Rate To Uniswap’s Level

On V3 and Infinity pools across all 11 supported chains, The Flip lifts the liquidity provider share of swap fees from the 66 to 68% they keep on most pools today to 88%. The remaining 12% goes to the treasury, and none of it goes to the burn.

Measured as revenue over fees for the 30 days to 18 October, the change takes PancakeSwap from the most extractive of the large AMMs to the level of the one it competes with most directly:

• PancakeSwap today: 32.7% of fees retained by the protocol.

• Raydium: 16.1%.

• Uniswap: 12.5%.

• PancakeSwap v3 and Infinity under The Flip: 12%.

The two exchanges are arriving at the same number from opposite directions.

• Uniswap spent the past year switching on the protocol fee, and it can afford to tax its liquidity because new chains such as Robinhood Chain and Arc install it as the default venue at launch.

• PancakeSwap is moving the other way because its liquidity has to be paid to stay. The Kitchen’s own projections, are up to 30% more liquidity in the same pools and 20 to 25% lower price impact. On 2025 volume, the new split would have paid V3 and Infinity LPs about $62 million more.

Existing Infinity pools fixed their LP fees at creation, so lowering the protocol cut lowers the total fee: a 1% pool becomes roughly 0.76%, with 0.67% going to LPs. And the emissions that survive, 7,000 CAKE a day, flow into a new fund called the Pantry for marketing, partnerships and seeding new pools, with no fixed allocations, spending caps or separate approval process.

On incentives, PancakeSwap already runs a lean model.

Over the same 30D it paid $1.59 million in token incentives against $6.07 million of revenue, about 26%. Aero paid $14.3 million against $8.15 million, and Uniswap paid nothing.

The emissions reduction moves PancakeSwap closer to Uniswap’s end of that range, and because the Pantry is discretionary, the remaining 7,000 a day becomes a budget the team spends rather than a reward the farms will receive.

Removing The V3 Burn Costs More CAKE Than The Emissions Cut Saves

The proposal trades away more burn than it saves in emissions. On the seven-report average, the weekly ledger moves like this:

1. Today: 633,500 CAKE burned against 157,500 minted, a net reduction of about 476,000 a week

2. v3 and Infinity burns removed: about 376,000 CAKE a week stops reaching the burn address

3. Emissions cut: minting falls to 49,000 a week, saving 108,500

4. After The Flip: a net reduction of roughly 208,000 CAKE a week, assuming V2 and side-product burns hold at their recent average

The Kitchen’s own figure (built on a 10-week average) is 190,000/week, or about 9.9 million CAKE and 3% of supply a year. Either way, net deflation falls by well over half.

This strategic move sized the new burn rate to clear the 2030 target with almost nothing to spare, and redirected every CAKE of deflation above that line to liquidity providers and the treasury.

The team said as much in the forum thread, where one of its members called deflation “a means, not the goal” and described the lower treasury income a deliberate short-term sacrifice.

Infinity And Stocks Are Growing But Barely Touch The Burn

PancakeSwap’s expansion this year is real, and yet almost none of it shows up in the burn.

Infinity, the hooks-based upgrade launched in April 2025, passed $150 billion in cumulative volume in early October, up from $113 billion in April. It runs on BNB Chain, Base, Robinhood Chain (since July) and Arc (since September), and on the last two every pool already pays LPs 90% of fees. It accounted for 3.1% of burns across the seven reports.

The Stock Terminal works similarly at a smaller scale. PancakeSwap has ranked as the leading venue for Binance’s bStocks, with roughly $75 million traded across names such as NVDA, TSLA and AAPL in one 24-hour window, and bStocks itself passed $1.2 billion in assets out of a tokenised stock market of about $3.5 billion.

The pre-IPO portal’s first raise filled $50 million in 1 minute 36 seconds. As of late July, though, core AMM pools generated more than 98% of protocol fees, with perpetuals, prediction markets and every other product under 2%.

Geography is shifting too. BNB Chain’s share of PancakeSwap’s tracked volume fell from 93.8% in the first half of 2025 to 83.4% a year later, while Base rose from 3.3% to 13.5%.

The new chains are where PancakeSwap already competes on LP-friendly terms, and The Flip carries those terms home to BNB Chain, where most of the volume, and most of the V3 burn, still sits.

V3 Volume Must Nearly Triple For The Treasury To Break Even

The Flip cuts the protocol’s share of V3 and Infinity fees from roughly a third to 12%. For protocol income from those pools to stay flat, their volume needs to rise by between 2.7 and 2.8x. The Kitchen’s best-case projection is 30% more liquidity.

Liquidity and volume are different quantities, and deeper pools can attract more than proportionally more flow when aggregators start routing to the venue with the lowest price impact.

Swings of that size are nothing new for PancakeSwap. Monthly volume was $52.6 billion in January 2026 against $27.3 billion in September, and its strongest months in 2025 cleared 5-10x the current pace.

Three forces could close that gap, and each one lands on the v3 pools The Flip reprices:

• Market-wide liquidity: PancakeSwap’s volume has followed the cycle far more closely than its own product launches. When risk appetite returns to spot DEX trading, BNB Chain takes an outsized share, and PancakeSwap takes most of BNB Chain’s: on 7 October 2025 it handled about $4.29 billion of the chain’s $6.05 billion daily DEX volume, ~71%. Pools that are 30% deeper when that flow returns give aggregators a reason to route more of it here.

• BNB Chain’s narrative pushes: No other chain converts a campaign into volume as quickly. BNB Chain’s record month, over $165 billion in June 2025, came during the Binance Alpha points programme, and Galaxy Research found much of it was farming; volume fell to less than half its peak once Binance removed trading volume from the points formula on 17 June. Binance has shown it can switch flow on, and the next push would meet pools paying LPs 88%.

• Tokenised stocks: This is the steadiest growth line on the chain. Weekly DEX volume in tokenised stocks rose from $45.8 million in early January to $2.54 billion in early October, and BNB Chain’s share of tokenised stock value grew from 9% to 32% over the same period, according to DWF Labs. Net buying is small next to that number, so a share of it is probably due to market making, arbitrage and possibly wash trading. The organic portion still clears through V3 pools, and between July and early September, PancakeSwap V3 and Uniswap together handled about $5.2 billion of it.

Volume can repair the treasury, but it can’t restore the burn. With the 12% routed to the treasury, even a sharp rise in V3 trading sends nothing to the burn address. Burns can only climb if traders return to V2 or governance votes to redirect fees again, and V2’s contribution has been shrinking for weeks.

CAKE Becomes A Volume Bet At Under 10x Revenue

On annualised 30D revenue, the market already values these exchanges very differently:

Uniswap’s multiple prices distribution, a venue that new chains install by default.

PancakeSwap’s multiple prices a token whose supply story has been the main thing holding it together while revenue fell by nine-tenths. The Flip retires much of that story on purpose.

My view is that it’s the right call, for a reason the burn data makes plain: the burn was always a receipt for volume, and the volume that paid for most of it came from v3 pools that now have to compete for liquidity on the same terms Uniswap offers. Keeping a third of V3 fees to burn CAKE made the supply chart look good while the fee base shrank underneath it.

Once The Flip goes live, holding CAKE means holding v2’s fixed burn and a treasury that collects 12% of fees from every other pool. That leaves one condition for the investment case: the extra liquidity must draw in enough new volume to pay back the fees handed to LPs.

If V3 and Infinity volume reaches 2.7 times today’s level by the time the rollout completes in January 2027, the treasury is whole, the 2030 target still lands, and CAKE enters the next cycle with LP terms that match Uniswap’s on its home chain.

Yet if volume stalls due to overall market liquidity or other factors, holders end up with a smaller treasury and a burn running at less than half today’s pace, while LPs keep the fees that used to fund both.

This article is purely for informational purposes only and does not construe any buy/sell advice. Always DYOR.

If it was useful, subscribe for more insights or guides which I write to show where crypto is heading towards.

A place where both yield and points farmooors can enjoy the treat!

It's time for Yield Collective No.60

Bring your wallet, let’s eat!

1) aUSD/frxUSD Merkl boost on Robinhood via Fables

Here outlined is a straightforward aUSD/frxUSD deposit path on Fablesfi (Robinhood chain) currently picking up a 38.29% Merkl boost plus points 👇

2) Multi-chain yield pool roundup

Live pools this week including 24% on SPY-USDG (Robinhood) and 40% on FXRP-USDT0 (Flare).

Mix of concentrated liquidity, vaults and lending 👇

3) Hand-picked stable yield destinations

A filtered list of current stable setups ranging from verified ~8-14% vaults to higher-risk 15-41% tranches on different chains

4) Polymarket Anthropic bankruptcy LP

A Polymarket setup on Anthropic bankruptcy by end-2027 (around 90-91c).

Roughly 12.3% APY including holding rewards, with limit bids and sells to capture LP volume while the NO side drifts higher.

5) Loopscale vaults post-Orca merge

Loopscale merged with Orca and here are current vault rates:

• USDC OnRe ~7% APY

• USDC Hylo ~9.4% APY

• SOL genesis ~4.8% APY

6) Weekly on-chain yield snapshot

The weekly roundup included three concrete yield options:

• Verantaxyz USDC vault at 18.68% APY on Base

• Vault_St Carry Vault at 10.4% APY on Ethereum

• Solana SOL vault at 4.73% APY

7) Plume Network vault APYs

A top-10 ranking of Plume Network vaults by APY.

Covers structures such as nOPAL (~10.7%), Liquid Credit (~19%), and several credit/treasury facilities with AUM figures attached 👇

Edition triple one dives into these:

> Whitelabel partners’ contribution to the ENA token bid

> State of inference providers (NEAR, VVV, IO etc.)

> Comparison of Canton vs Robinhood

> Privacy apps on the rise (ZCash names, zkAPI etc.)

Many more reads inside 👇

1) Glasscade Research: How Much Does Ethena Whitelabel Add To The ENA Buybacks?

Whitelabel supply is still small and mostly not USDe-backed, so it sends nothing to ENA until the fee switch turns on.

The bigger effect is pushing total USDe across buyback tiers 👇

2) The State of Crypto Inference Providers

The whole liquid crypto AI category is smaller than one data-center company.

On OpenRouter the crypto providers are about 1% of tokens.

Venice leads on volume mostly through its own app.

Most networks still lean on token incentives to keep supply online.

The moat is not obvious yet 👇

3) Robinhood Chain vs. Canton Network: How Canton Can Replicate Robinhood’s Success

Robinhood started with millions of funded accounts and opened an EVM chain around stock tokens.

Canton started with institutional settlement, privacy, and DTCC-scale collateral.

One owns distribution, the other owns the assets 👇

4) Privacy Apps Are Having Their Moment

Network-level privacy work is real, but the usable products right now are the new apps.

Shielded ETH with readable names, private Solana balances, unlinkable Polymarket wallets, and zkAPI for AI calls.

Caps and small sets are still there 👇

5) The d(3,3) Model Breakdown

Nami’s d(3,3) tries to break that by adjusting emissions weekly from fees and efficiency signals, and by running as one protocol across chains.

The backtest on nine DEXs is the part worth your time 👇

6) Who Builds on Avalanche: The Companies Behind the Chain’s RWA Growth

Avalanche holds more than a billion in distributed RWAs, yet a small number of wallets and issuers dominate.

Institutions are running custom L1s for records and settlement while still connecting to public liquidity and credit.

The numbers look different from the actual usage 👇

7) The Era of Industry: Q3 2026 Crypto Industry Investment Report

The number of deals stayed flat, but the big expansion buys disappeared.

What remained were smaller acquisitions that add a license, a payments rail or an institutional trading desk, while capital shifted toward companies that already have revenue and away from pure blockchain experiments 👇

In case you missed it…

Inside The JUP Bid: What Pays, What Feeds, What Doesn’t

Jupiter’s lending lead sent the token up 43%, yet swaps and perps still fund roughly 90% of the buyback.

Lend retained only $189k over the same window the other two engines put millions into Litterbox.

The piece shows why the market is pricing the funnel more than the lending revenue itself 👇

In brief: Jupiter’s lending lead sent JUP up 43%, but swaps and perps still fund about 90% of its buyback. This piece shows how Jupiter’s product suite has evolved by, what the rally is pricing in and what has to happen for lending to carry its weight.

Over the 30D to mid-October, Jupiter set aside about $2.7 million to buy back its own token.

Roughly $1.43 million of that came from routing other people’s swaps and $1.03 million from a perpetuals exchange.

The lending market whose growth sent the token up 43% in a month retained $189,000 of revenue over a similar 30D window.

Jupiter Lend overtaking Kamino as Solana’s largest lender made the headlines, but Jupiter’s menu now runs beyond staking to Spot, Stocks, Perps, Predict, Gacha, Lend, and Offerbook.

Amongst these, only two of them have a disclosed, product-level line into the buyback. Separating those two from the rest tells you what the market is paying for, and how much of it already exists.

Two Products Pay for Almost All of JUP’s Buyback

Since February 2025, Jupiter has sent 50% of its on-chain revenue to the Jupiter Litterbox Trust, which buys JUP on the open market and has burned roughly 134 million tokens to date.

Perps contributes differently from the rest → 75% of Perps fees go to liquidity providers in the JLP pool and 25% to the protocol, so only the protocol’s quarter enters the buyback split.

The 30D holder revenue for Jupiter, which tracks the buyback allocation, came to $2.7 million in mid-October:

1. Aggregator (Ultra swaps): $1.43 million, from $2.86 million in platform fees on $13.58 billion of routed volume.

2. Perps: $1.03 million, from $2.05 million in protocol revenue on $8.22 million of total fees and $5.75 billion of volume.

3. Not attributed to a product: about $240,000

Based on a $1.1 billion circulating market cap, the full $2.7 million is ~0.25% per month. This is small in any single month but the steady cycle can pile up - the Litterbox Trust has absorbed about 175 million JUP since its November 2025 burn, around 5% of circulating supply, funded by roughly $27.6 million of revenue so far this year.

The Aggregator Still Funds Half the Buyback

The aggregator is the oldest engine and still the largest, and its revenue has held up better than its market share.

• Revenue: Quarterly figures show aggregator swap fees of $12.15 million in Q3 2025, $6.19 million in Q2 2026 and $9.96 million in Q3 2026, a 61% rebound Q-o-Q.

• Share: Jupiter once routed more than 90% of Solana aggregator volume. By late August 2026 its daily share had fallen to 68%, and on one day it dropped to 48%, the first time competitors collectively handled more volume than Jupiter.

• Competition: over the 30D to 22 September, Jupiter routed $15.5 billion, against $9.2 billion for DFlow and $3.8 billion for OKX.

The aggregator is earning more from a shrinking slice, which works while Solana trading is busy and offers no cushion when it isn’t. Half of JUP’s buyback depends on a business that is both cyclical and contested.

Perps As the Second Engine

Jupiter Perps has processed more than $507 billion in cumulative volume, and its 30D fees of $8.22 million are larger than the aggregator’s.

The fee split is why it contributes less to the buyback → the

JLP pool is paid first, and the protocol’s 25% is then halved again for the Litterbox, leaving the buyback with 12.5 cents of every Perps fee dollar.

Perps is also where JupUSD, Jupiter’s own stablecoin, matters most:

• Launch and backing: Jupiter launched JupUSD with Ethena in January 2026, initially backed 90% by USDtb, which in turn holds BlackRock’s tokenised BUIDL fund.

• Integration: Ethena said about $500 million of USDC inside JLP would move into JupUSD as part of a phased transition, and JupUSD deposits on Jupiter Lend mint a yield-bearing jlJupUSD token.

Its role so far is to keep dollar liquidity inside Jupiter’s own stack rather than in Circle’s.

Jupiter Mobile Is A Distribution Funnel

Jupiter Mobile is the product most people forget when they talk about the token, and in my opinion, the one hardest to measure.

In September, Jupiter reported more than 1.68 million downloads, about 240,000 active users over 30D, $575 million in volume and $770,000 in fees over the same window.

What Jupiter Mobile adds is surface area, mostly through the Jupiter Global Visa card:

• Cashback: up to 4%, capped at $100 a month, with the top rate now requiring two referred friends who each spend at least $50 a month.

• Funding: users can top up the card from any token in their wallet in one transaction.

Each of these features gives a user a reason to keep balances inside Jupiter’s interface. Jupiter has not mentioned how much of Mobile’s $770,000 in fees is already counted inside the aggregator line, since in-app swaps route through the same engine.

Here, I treat Jupiter Mobile as a funnel that puts idle balances one tap away from Lend, Perps and the aggregator.

Lending Helped Clinch A Top Spot

That funnel is exactly how Jupiter Lend took the top spot.

Over the 30D to early October, Jupiter Lend’s TVL grew 28.1% against Kamino’s 5.7%, mostly on stablecoin deposits. The closest Tradfi parallel is the brokerage cash sweep → idle balances in a trading account move into an interest-bearing product by default because they are already there.

It fits a pattern I have tracked across stablecoins, card programmes and tokenised equities, where distribution beats issuance.

The August upgrade made those balances more useful to Jupiter than a plain lending book would be. Lend v2 went live on 10 August with two opt-in modes:

• Smart Collateral pairs deposits of USDC, USDT, SOL or JupSOL into correlated liquidity pools inside Fluid vaults that power Jupiter’s DEX, so the same capital earns lending interest and swap fees.

• Smart Debt does the same on the borrow side, letting swap fees offset part of the interest owed.

• Traction: the AMM component crossed $100 million in 7D volume two weeks after launch.

• Risk: if either asset in a Smart Collateral pair depegs, the depositor takes the loss.

The swap fees go to depositors as extra yield, so they never appear in Lend’s protocol revenue.

What Jupiter gets is liquidity sitting inside its own routing paths, so Lend’s revenue line undercounts what Lend does for the stack.

What v2 hasn’t done is bring borrowers in at the same pace as depositors. The lead is clear on deposits and contested on loans:

1. Jupiter Lend at $1.411 billion in TVL and $1.043 billion in active loans, against Kamino’s $1.403 billion and $1 billion (per DefiLlama)

2. $2.43 billion in TVL and $992 million in loans, against Kamino Lend’s $2.13 billion and $1.05 billion (per Token Terminal)

About 41% of Jupiter Lend’s TVL was lent out, against about 49% at Kamino. It shows a consistent thread which many protocols’ lending products face: Jupiter pulled in deposits faster than it found borrowers, and fresh stablecoin deposits will dilute utilisation and yield until borrow demand catches up.

On the loans it does have, Jupiter also keeps less compared to Kamino.

And Lend’s revenue is not all Jupiter’s to keep → Fluid, which built the engine underneath it, takes half under a 50/50 revenue share. Thin margins are the price of winning deposits quickly, and they are why Lend’s lead has not turned into meaningful revenue yet.

Jupiter’s Newer Products Widen the Funnel

More than half of the current product suite launched within the past 18 months. Though their earnings are still quite minimal, my take is that certain aspects has the potential of becoming a huge revenue generator for Jupiter.

As of now:

Gacha is the only newer product with enough third-party data to show a trend. Pine Analytics found Jupiter sold 11% of Collector Crypt’s Q3 pack sales by value, falling from 35% in launch week to between 6% and 9% in most weeks after, and Gacha’s September arrival in Jupiter Mobile did not lift that share.

The pattern is breadth bought ahead of monetisation. Each product gives a different kind of user a reason to open Jupiter, and little of it shows up in disclosed revenue yet.

JUP Is Pricing the Balance Sheet

Jupiter’s monthly fees have fallen from $128 million at the January 2025 peak to about $9 million today.

Over the same month that JUP climbed 43%, SOL fell, so whatever is driving the token, it is unlikely due to the current buyback or the chain it runs on.

The float impacts the move:

• Staked: more than 1.1 billion JUP, about a third of the 3.32 billion circulating supply, behind a 7D unstaking cooldown.

• Bought back: around 175 million more, bringing the total held out of easy reach to roughly 38.5% of circulating supply.

• Emissions: the February 2026 Net-Zero Emissions vote passed with 75.3% support, cutting planned net-new emissions for the year from about 1.2 billion JUP to effectively ZERO

A thinner tradeable float with no scheduled dilution lets modest new demand move the price a long way, in both directions.

How Jupiter Fits Into The Revenue Meta

The market has spent the past year rewarding tokens that behave like claims on on-chain cash flow → revenue anyone can audit, routed to holders through buybacks or burns, with dilution switched off.

To be fair, the winners and almost all of them are volume bets. Hyperliquid’s revenue rides perps flow and Uniswap’s fee switch rides swap flow. Holders are substantially buying operating leverage to the next wave of activity, and a buyback and/or burn that turns it into demand for the token.

JUP already fits that template.

Half of Jupiter’s on-chain revenue goes to programmatic buybacks, net-new emissions are effectively zero after February’s vote, and the Litterbox has absorbed about 5% of circulating supply since its last burn.

Undoubtedly, the leverage runs both ways → the same fee lines that hit $128 million in a month at the peak fell to single digits once Solana trading cooled.

Now, piecing the full picture together shows how the bid for JUP builds up:

• About 90% of the buyback comes from the aggregator and Perps, two businesses whose revenue rises and falls with Solana trading activity

• Jupiter Mobile, Stocks, Gacha, JupUSD and Lend v2’s dual-use deposits feed users and liquidity into those two engines

• Lend is the only product with a slower clock, earning every block a loan stays open, and its $189,000 of 30-day retained revenue is a fraction of what either engine sends to the buyback

On its own, Lend has two routes to matter, and both are narrow:

1. Raise the take rate → means cutting yield on the most rate-sensitive capital in crypto, right after that yield won the deposits, with Kamino offering fixed-rate borrowing and half of any increase going to Fluid

2. Raise utilisation → depends on borrow demand, which tracks leverage appetite, which tracks the same trading cycle that already drives the other two engines.

The first spends the edge that won the deposits and the second runs straight back to volume.

Either way, Lend matters more as a multiplier than as a standalone business, and that is what sets Jupiter apart → how many places it can catch the next wave.

• The router takes spot flow, Perps takes leverage, and Mobile, Stocks and Gacha keep pulling in users who never touched a DEX

• Lend sits underneath all of it as a multiplier, funding the positions that trade

• Smart Collateral parks deposits as liquidity inside Jupiter’s own router

When activity picks up, Jupiter is where traders borrow, where they route and where they lever up.

That is the pitch for the next round of flows → a buyback with no dilution behind it, attached to the widest net for Solana volume.

This article is purely for informational purposes only and does not construe any buy/sell advice. Always DYOR.

If it was useful, subscribe for more insights or guides which I write to show where crypto is heading towards.

Likes and restacks help these reach the people who should see them.

A place where both yield and points farmooors can enjoy the treat!

It's time for Yield Collective No.59

Bring your wallet, let’s eat!

1) Yield destinations for early October

PT-USDat around 9.5% fixed, Ember PPLUS near 16% supply (looping can push ~35%), sUSDe still ~5%.

Most of the higher prints still depend on incentives 👇

2) Updates on latest yields

sUSDe is at 4.8% APY, Growi Finance printed 55.83% 30D on a Hyperliquid vault, and Axis Foundation averaged 22.55%👇

3) PT on fxSAVE

Mint fxUSD against ETH (0.5% fee, no borrow APR), then take the PT when implied APY beats fxSAVE.

Right now that PT is 8.8%, versus ~6.5% in the vault.

It matures in less than a month 👇

4) Delta-neutral gold strategy offering ~94% APY

Here’s a a delta-neutral gold loop: long PAXG on Kamino, short gold on Phoenix Trade.

Paid-to-borrow plus funding lands near 94.2% APY on the example size.

Note: liquidation is ~6% down on the long leg, and OI is thin 👇

5) UPDATE: Bitwise PPLUS on Ember

Bitwise’s premium+ vault on Ember Protocol’s PPLUS is now past $14M TVL, with a 12.42% 30D average APY, and the same asset can be lent on Suilend Protocol and Bluefin👇

6) Brazilian Real at full CDI

Conta VC now pays 13.6% APY on Brazilian bonds via Reserva, with Nora Finance as the $BRS reserve on Base.

That is 100% of CDI, against savings accounts that usually pay a fraction 👇

7) Two stable vaults in the weekly scan

Here are 2 stablecoin vaults mentioned:

• Saturn’s sUSDat is at 14.33% APY after minting USDat from USDC

• The Bitcoin Dollar USDC vault on BTCD Official is at 11.48% APY

Both sit on Ethereum 👇

I spent the week reading so you don’t have to:

> The bank’s $2 call on Ethena barely counts the card

> A tokenised stock traded at 4x the real share over a weekend

> Polymarket’s chain bill got big enough to leave

> Most launch budgets stop the day the token lists

It’s time to dig in 👇

1) How Much Can Ethena Pay Contribute To the ENA Bid?

Standard Chartered’s $2 ENA call barely prices the card.

Glasscade’s data says Ethena Pay needs about $9.5B a year, roughly 400 times today’s run rate, before holders should notice it 👇

2) The Liquid Investors Buffet

Crypto spent years as a lemon market, because buyers could not tell a real business from a dump.

The filter is alignment, real earnings and less overhang, which is why Ethena’s cleanup got paid.

The ranking is the part to argue with, since inference and tokenised stocks sit above the coins people already hold 👇

3) Whoever Owns the Liquidity Owns Robinhood Chain

Tokenised HIMS traded above 4x the real share over a weekend, and about $39,000 of buying was enough to get it there.

Robinhood wants thousands of stocks onchain, yet the issuers told Standard they do not care about the pool.

The launchpad is only the wrapper, so the trade is who owns the depth when New York is closed 👇

4) Polymarket burned $18M on Polygon gas. Is V2 the escape hatch?

Polymarket has burned $18.1M of Polygon gas in two years, and 95% of that arrived in the last 12 months.

Gas is only about 1.8 bps of volume, so the bill was never the problem.

At 10x today’s load it would not fit on Polygon, which is why V2 already looks like the boxes are packed? 👇

5) The Evolution of the Crypto Bundle: From Extraction to Infrastructure

Bundles got a bad name because twenty wallets can look like twenty buyers and still be one seller waiting to exit.

Mosh keeps the opening bundle on Robinhood Chain, then locks the inventory in agent vaults and pays funders from fees instead of a dump.

A market maker can make a token tradable, though, and it still cannot make anyone want it 👇

6) Options Supercycle

Perps have done about $18T all time, while onchain options sit at $75.5B. In TradFi the gap runs the other way, and options already dwarf futures.

A perp can still liquidate you on a wick after the direction was right, which is why the first venue that fixes strikes and listings matters more than another points programme 👇

7) Token Launch Budget: What It Actually Costs End to End

A token launch can land near $20,000 or past $200,000 over six months, and both are real.

The listing fee is rarely the largest line, because the market-making retainer plus inventory of $20,000 to $1M usually exceeds it.

The miss is a budget that ends on listing day, when the obligations have only just started 👇

A place where both yield and points farmooors can enjoy the treat!

It's time for Yield Collective No.58

Bring your wallet, let’s eat!

1) Four Morpho loops above 20%

This trackins four Morpho loops: reUSD/USDC ~11.8% base plus Re points, sUSDai/USDT ~27% base, PT-reUSD ~30–35% at 8–9x, PT-USDat up to ~36.6%.

Health factor above ~1.03 on the PT loops is suggested because of TWAP oracles 👇

2) NEAR20 barrier calls on Rhea

There is a NEAR20 strat from Margarita finance: spot NEAR stays on, and weekly premium comes from short-dated barrier calls.

Sideways or a moderate rise keeps that premium in NAV 👇

3) Fluid USDC vault bonus on Base

Fluid’s USDC vault on Base through Jumper Earn: up to 10% bonus APY on top of base yield, from a $5k USDC Merkl stream, through Oct 6.

Small campaign, and only the Jumper path qualifies 👇

4) Solana stable yield board

Solana’s stable board got rewritten this week. This week has Reflect eHYUSD at 60.60% APY, jrEHYUSD still at 24.68%, and Backyard USDC at 17.06%.

The top print is new and incentive-sensitive, so the tranche matters more than the headline 👇

5) WETH/USDC range on Kyber (Base)

Here’s a WETH/USDC pool on Base via Kyber Network showing up to ~223% APR. That print only holds inside the range.

ETH leaving it changes the result, which is why the sizing example is small 👇

This week was a set of arguments about claims on fees, on hacks, on attention.

> UNI’s multiple barely moved but the revenue did

> NEAR froze Bitget’s stolen funds mid-flow

> Retrieval is the unpriced market

> A 3-week-old quantum coin with a tight float

It’s time to dig in 👇

1) Uniswap: The Revenue Meta’s Test Case For TradFi Buyers

Uniswap’s price rose about as fast as monthly protocol revenue, from $4.49m to $16.11m, so the multiple barely moved. Robinhood Chain supplied most of the new burn, and Arc is the same placement that still pays nothing.

Even so, Uniswap holds the lead for DEXs and is the usual liquidity choice for new chains 👇

2) The State of Crypto in 2026: What Q3 Changed and What Comes Next

Crypto market cap fell to about $2.1T by June, then recovered toward $3T by late September.

The more interesting shift is what traded. RWA perps did about $365B in Q3, and Visa’s stablecoin settlement run rate hit $20B.

Q4 is a test of whether that activity sticks 👇

3) Fixing Crypto Tokenomics: How New SEC Guidance Could Change the Game

For a decade, lawyers told founders not to share revenue, buy back tokens, or let holders benefit. The SEC staff just said most of that was an unnecessary reading of the law. The protocols already have customers.

What is still missing is a token with a claim on the cash 👇

4) The Bitget Hack: What We Saw at NEAR Intents

Hackers tried to push more than $50m of the Bitget haul through NEAR Intents. About $166k got through and $503k was frozen mid-flow.

The line they are drawing is that permissionless does not have to mean neutral, and a lot of people building rails will hate that sentence.

5) How to Launch a Chain

Robinhood built a chain for tokenised stocks, and the early volume came from memes.

About 70% of those equity trades happened outside US hours, and supply is already over $150m. The App Store started with iFart too.

The question is which chains own the door users walk through 👇

6) The Read Layer for Machine Intelligence

Grass is already paid by AI labs for training data: $17m in 2025 and another $17m in the first half of 2026.

The bet is that live retrieval, every time a model searches the web, dwarfs one-off pretraining dumps 👇

7) The privacy cabal has gone all in on quantum

The Zcash crowd is on the cap table of a three-week-old proof-of-work chain with lattice signatures and a tiny float.

At $60 the circulating market is about $2.3m, and NEAR has announced it before it can trade there 👇

In Case You Missed It…

- Why Do We Need So Many Consortium Stablecoins?

Inside ten weeks a 21-institution group, Open USD and JPMorgan all committed to putting dollars on public chains, but only JPMorgan is fencing its own deposits.

The other two chase the same regulated-payments slot USDC already holds, and the club still has not named a chain 👇

In brief: 3 groups just committed to putting dollars on public chains within ten weeks of each other: a 21-institution group, the 200-partner Open USD alliance, and JPMorgan. This works through whether the world needs all three (non-exhaustive), where they overlap, and who are the parties which are affected.

Inside ten weeks, a 21-institution group, a 200-plus-partner alliance called Open USD, and JPMorgan all committed to putting dollars on public chains. Each wants its own recognised unit of value, its own rail, its own claim on how money moves on-chain.

Which raises a fair question before any of the who-wins talk: does the world need three of these, or are these institutions duplicating each other’s function because none wants to be the one that sat it out?

The answer isn’t the same at every layer.

Non-duplication At The Instrument Layer

For the layman, a stablecoin and a deposit token look identical: a dollar balance hopping between addresses. A layer deeper shows the split is in the legal wrapper, which determines its accessibility.

• A stablecoin is a bearer claim on a reserve portfolio, so whoever holds it holds the claim and it moves freely outside any single institution

• A deposit token is a claim on one specific bank, permissioned to that bank’s clients, and it never leaves the bank’s regulated perimeter

JPM Coin, live on Base as JPMD, is the second kind. JPMorgan keeps insisting the token is neither a cryptocurrency nor a stablecoin, and that insistence is doing real work.

It will be the first token of its kind on a public blockchain, enabling fast, secure, 24/7 money movement between trusted parties.

A freely transferable stablecoin would let deposits walk out of the bank and into someone else’s token, draining the cheap funding that pays for the loan book.

On the flipside, a deposit token can’t, because the claim only exists inside JPMorgan. And this is not a pilot: Kinexys, the unit that runs it, is already moving north of $7 billion a day in tokenised deposits.

So one of the three is solving a problem the others can’t. JPMorgan isn’t racing anyone - it’s fencing off its own deposit base while the fencing is cheap. So the redundancy question lives with the other two, both of which issue bearer claims that let dollars move away from any one bank.

What’s The Strategy Here?

You don’t need to read a design doc to work out what each vehicle is going for. Just look at who showed up to join the groups.

The 21-institution group is akin to a 'banking club' (almost no payments layer anywhere in the group):

• Deposit franchises and correspondent networks fill the room: Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank, UBS, MUFG, Santander

• The only non-banks are two asset managers, Fidelity and WisdomTree

• Absent: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, and BlackRock as a named member

Open Standard’s Open USD is a stack club, and the guest list is the opposite shape. They assembled around >200 partners across four layers:

• Payment networks: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, Western Union

• Banks and asset managers: BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, SoFi

• Tech and commerce: Google, Shopify, IBM, DoorDash

• Crypto rails: Coinbase, Ripple, Aave, Solana, MetaMask

One roster is built to make a token read as bank-grade to a treasurer and a supervisor.

The other is built to reach where card and merchant volume already sits.

And BBVA turns up on both lists, which tells you the big banks are hedging across vehicles rather than backing a single winner, the same way JPMorgan hedges by keeping a public-stablecoin option open while it runs its deposit token.

Even the participants aren’t sure how many of these need to exist, what more the retail crowd?

Is This Necessary?

Let’s see a comparison on what these 3 competing for to have a clearer idea:

1) Open USD

• Competing over reserve yield and processor distribution: mint and redeem at zero fee with no volume cap, and most reserve income handed back to partners rather than pocketed by a single issuer in the Circle or Tether style

• Makes sense if the goal is to become the shared dollar that card networks, processors and merchants route through, with banks along for the ride rather than owning the thing

2) The 21-institution group

• Fighting over who issues the regulated dollar their own customers are allowed to hold: issuance, KYC, compliance and float kept inside the banking system, public rails used only for settlement

• Circle and Tether pushed out from between them and their own depositors

3) JPMorgan

• Competing over the same dollar circulation within their bank. Its answer is a permissioned deposit token that keeps the balance inside JPM infrastructure while settling around the clock on a public L2, with test transactions run alongside B2C2, Coinbase and Mastercard.

When you try to understand their objective, certain parts are understandable, while the other confusing bits begets the question: “are these necessary?”

JPMorgan is off in its own lane, but groups 1 and 2 are aiming at overlapping territory, the regulated dollar that touches payments and institutional settlement, from opposite ends. That is where the duplication lives.

The ‘Institution Group’ Is Lagging A Year Behind (and yet to exist)

Open USD (OUSD) went fully live at end Sep 2026, with named chains, a named issuer and published contract addresses: it runs natively on Base, Ethereum, Solana and Tempo, issued by Bridge, a Stripe company, with reserves at BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY and monthly attestations promised.

The 21 have committed to form the company in the second half of 2026, target a dollar token for the first half of 2027, then a euro token and other G7 currencies beyond. No news of chain, custodian stack, ticker, and the whole vehicle still sits behind closing conditions.

The maturity gap comes with a matching gap in risk. Open USD is live, so its exposure is operational: redemption at scale, and keeping a 200-party board from becoming a committee that can’t ship a decision.

The consortium’s exposure is more basic, because the company it depends on hasn’t been formed yet, and a firm date from 21 balance sheets is a commitment rather than a product. JPM Coin skips the timeline question by already being live.

Is Circle The Target?

The two dollar tokens sit in different slots, and only one of those slots is what the banks are aiming at.

• Tether is the crypto-native workhorse: the default trading pair across exchanges and the offshore dollar for much of Asia and emerging markets

• USDC is the regulated-payments dollar, built to touch banks, card schemes and regulated funds

A bank-issued regulated dollar aimed at cross-border payments and institutional settlement lands right on top of USDC’s slot, not Tether’s.

The total stablecoin market of roughly $316 billion, USDT carries about $187 billionn and USDC around $75 billion. The incumbent Circle is chasing is Tether, and the incumbent the banks are chasing is Circle. It’s a tail chasing exercise.

Tether’s protection is structural. Its strength is crypto-native liquidity and offshore dollar demand, neither of which a GENIUS Act or MiCA-badged bank token is built to fight for. It only gets exposed if the next payments wave decides it wants a licensed issuer, which is exactly the flow the consortium and Open USD are aiming at - nobody wants Circle to keep it uncontested.

That said, we can’t conclude Circle would be the ONLY party affected.

Who else is liable?

• Single-issuer float businesses. Tether is more insulated on crypto trading and offshore dollar demand. It is less insulated if the next wave of payments volume wants a bank or consortium issuer with a US or EU licence.

• Correspondent banking and SWIFT on corridors that tokenise cleanly. Not dead. Slower and more expensive on those lanes.

• Banks that sit out. If deposits migrate into someone else’s token, they lose cheap funding and the payment relationship. That is why JPMorgan is hedging, and why Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are in the 21 and in other tokenised-deposit work such as The Clearing House.

• Private-only bank chains. The 21 walking onto public rails is a vote against keeping this solely on their own ledger.

  ---

The Chain Catalyst To Be Revealed

Scott Melker’s read is right on the important part: tokens running on public chains rather than a private bank ledger is the real signal.

The winner of “not a walled garden” isn’t necessarily a bank, it also benefits the L1 or L2 which ends up hosting bank-grade dollar settlement, because that chain captures settlement volume rather than trading volume, which is stickier and larger than the speculative flows.

Open USD has already told the market where it runs. The 21 have not, and that eventual chain pick is the announcement worth positioning around, because when a group that size names the rail its regulated dollar will settle on, the flow that follows dwarfs the average token listing.

None of this is guaranteed to ship on schedule (and don’t expect it to): closing conditions, licensing and chain selection remain open for the consortium, and Open USD still has to prove redemption at scale on a reserve setup it hasn’t fully itemised.

Okay, back to the question this started with.

At the instrument layer, three are warranted: a deposit token, a payments primitive and a bank-issued regulated dollar are different tools, and JPMorgan proves the jobs don’t collapse into one.

At the distribution layer they mostly aren’t, because two vehicles are chasing the same regulated-payments slot and that slot has room for one default.

The banks that issue inside their own garden keep control and lose distribution, the consortia that share issuance gain distribution and dilute control, and the incumbents who own the liquidity keep the installed base until one rail becomes the default for new regulated flow.

Despite getting more clarity now and then, I can’t help to think of these when I see similar news:

• Are there any supporting macro/regulatory conditions for it the thrive?

• What is the USP and is it necessary?

• Can a solo player be big enough that their determined transfer of value is accepted by other players?

• How far behind are they compared to competitors?

There is no clear winner in this early race, and I think this would take at least 3-5 years to filter which standard gets adopted, and which gets replaced.

This article is purely for informational purposes only and does not construe any buy/sell advice. Always DYOR.

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In brief: The revenue meta says capital settles on tokens that behave like claims on cash flow. Uniswap is now one of the cleanest tests of that idea: a daily, auditable fee line spread across every chain that picks it as the default venue. UNI’s monthly protocol revenue rose roughly as fast as its price off the lows. Two new chains, a V4 upgrade and a bank’s $100 target explain why, and why the revenue base is getting broader.

For most of its life, the largest spot exchange in crypto has been a paradox. It processed more trading volume than any other venue, and its token captured almost none of the economics.

Even after holders voted to turn on protocol fees at the end of 2025, the token kept sliding and reached around $2.50 by mid-2026.

3 months later it was trading above $10.

Uniswap’s recovery is easy to file under the fee switch finally being priced in.

But the numbers point somewhere narrower.

Uniswap’s monthly protocol revenue rose by roughly the same factor as the price, from an average of $4.49 million a month in Q2 to $16.11 million over the last 30 days, which leaves the valuation multiple close to where it began.

The revenue did the lifting, and most of the new revenue came from a new blockchain.

Years Of Volume Leadership But Almost None Of The Fees To UNI

Uniswap has operated since 2018 and has shaped how most AMMs in crypto work.

• V3 introduced concentrated liquidity in May 2021, letting LPs place capital inside a chosen price range instead of across the whole curve. Most competing DEXs have since copied that design.

• V4 launched in early 2025. It moved every pool into a single contract and added hooks, which let developers attach custom logic to pools, swaps, fees and LP positions.

The token that governed all of this saw very little of the money:

• Cumulative DEX volume stands at $3.93 trillion, and cumulative fees at $6.02 billion

• Cumulative holders’ revenue is $51.92 million, which is 0.86% of every fee the protocol has generated, and all of it arrived after the fee switch went live

The UNIfication proposal changed how value reaches the token. Protocol fees now collect in a “token jar”, and UNI holders can destroy their tokens to withdraw an equivalent amount of crypto from it. On V2, the 0.30% trading fee was split into 0.25% for liquidity providers and 0.05% for the protocol. The proposal also burned 100 million UNI from the treasury, worth roughly $596 million at the time.

For the first time there was a fee line a desk could model and a shrinking supply to set it against. Yet, the market did not price it in until half a year later.

Limited Impact Of Fee Switch Until It Reached New Volume

Fees went live in stages.

They started on Ethereum, extended to the major L2s and then to Polygon, BSC and Celo, and finally reached Robinhood Chain and V4 in late July 2026.

The quarterly token-holder income shows when the switch began to pay:

• Q1 2026: $10.66 million

• Q2 2026: $13.48 million

• Q3 2026 to date: $27.62 million

The first half of the year annualises to about $50 million. That is thin for a token valued in the billions, and it might explain why the price kept falling after the vote.

Every chain in the early rollout had mature volume that the market had already priced. The switch needed new flow to tax which only arrived in the second half of the year.

Over the past 30 days, V4 processed $42.34 billion of volume and generated $131.38 million in fees. V3 processed $35.53 billion and generated $55.81 million.

V4 earned 2.35 times V3’s fees on about 19% more volume, and it did so with less liquidity → V4 ranks 5th among DEX deployments by TVL, while V3 ranks 2nd.

Hooks turn out to be a distribution tool. Launchpads on new chains deploy directly into v4 pools, and custom fee logic lets pools charge more on volatile long-tail pairs, allowing Uniswap can host new market types without forking its core AMM.

Robinhood Chain Supplied Most Of The New Revenue

Robinhood Chain went live with Uniswap V2, V3, V4 and UniswapX deployed from the start and Uniswap as its primary public AMM. Once governance extended fees to the chain, the burn accelerated quickly.

On its busiest days, Uniswap handled up to 98% of the chain’s DEX volume, and Robinhood Chain funded more than 80% of Uniswap’s daily UNI burn.

The 30-day split shows how much of Uniswap’s economics now sit on a chain that Uniswap doesn’t control:

• Volume → Robinhood Chain accounted for $44.54 billion of Uniswap’s $91.46 billion, which is 48.7%.

• Fees → Robinhood Chain produced $149.69 million of ~$210 million, which is 71.3%.

• Revenue → Robinhood Chain produced $9.59 million of $16.11 million, which is 59.5%.

The last seven days look different. Over that week, Robinhood Chain generated $1.19 million of Uniswap’s $3.02 million in revenue, while Ethereum generated $945,913, which puts the two chains close to level. Robinhood Chain’s weekly fees of $18.42 million are less than half its average pace earlier in the month. The decline could be attributed to the cooling memecoin trading and to some high-fee pools being withdrawn.

There is a second problem that gets less attention. For every dollar of fees on Robinhood Chain, the protocol keeps about 6.4 cents. On Ethereum it keeps 14.8 cents, and on Base 12.2 cents.

Even though Robinhood chain powered the rally, it is the least efficient source of burn per dollar traded, and its volume is already coming off the peak.

Arc Showed The Default-Venue Win Is Repeatable, But It Does Not Pay Yet

If Robinhood Chain were a one-off, the premium on UNI would be hard to defend. Circle’s Arc suggests otherwise. Similarly, Uniswap V2, V3, V4 and UniswapX went live on Arc as a preferred DEX, and the Pools launchpad sends every new token into a Uniswap v4 pool paired with USDC.

Circle had a clear reason to anchor its stablecoin chain to Uniswap since in Q2 2026, $43 billion of stablecoin-to-stablecoin swaps settled on Uniswap, more than the next three on-chain venues combined.

Uniswap’s first-day volume on Arc was several times larger than on Robinhood Chain’s opening day. Over the past 30 days, Uniswap has done $637.55 million of volume on Arc, while Aero, the only other established DEX there, has done $13.71 million, a gap of roughly 46 times.

Most of Arc’s early activity came from memecoin launchpads, and at least one of the largest launches directly into Uniswap pools.

None of it feeds the burn yet.

Uniswap’s Arc deployment has generated $4.39 million in fees and zero protocol revenue, because the proposal to switch fees on there is still going through governance.

Despite giving Uniswap the default primary DEX status on each new chain, if the fee-burn switch is not yet live, it does not contribute much to the token’s price support via burns.

Regulation And Listed Futures Widened The Buyer Base

The final leg of the rally changed who can own UNI and left the protocol’s earnings untouched.

The SEC granted temporary, conditional relief that lets approved venues trade tokenised US stocks through permissioned AMMs and liquidity pools without registering as an exchange.

Uniswap already offers Permissioned Pools on v4, which let issuers control who can trade or provide liquidity.

The exemption has a gap that most coverage skipped. It only covers tokens that carry the same rights as the underlying shares. Synthetic price-tracking products are excluded, and the relief also caps how many stocks and how much volume can trade. The market celebrated a regulatory door that Uniswap’s largest current tokenised-stock flow does not pass through.

CME followed with plans to list regulated UNI futures in October, pending review, and that could really open doors for tradfi audiences to own a piece of the protocol.

Standard Chartered’s $100 Target

The most aggressive institutional case for the token came Stanchart in June, when they initiated coverage with a $100 target for the end of 2030, on a path of $6.50 by end-2026, $20 in 2027, $40 in 2028 and $65 in 2029. The token cleared the first marker within 3 months.

The model stacks three assumptions:

• Supply → on-chain tokenised assets grow from about $340 billion to $4 trillion by the end of 2028

• Capture → the share of those assets used in DeFi rises from 3.5% to 30% by 2030, leaving Uniswap’s pools with roughly 37 times their current assets

• Valuation → if Uniswap commercialises and builds enough tradfi partnerships, its market-cap-to-fees multiple expands toward Coinbase’s

The shorthand example is YouTube versus Netflix. Uniswap is an open platform where anyone creates pools and users supply the liquidity, which keeps capital requirements low and gives it an edge in near-identical assets like stablecoins and in tokens too niche for a centralised exchange.

The fee lens is where the argument gets tested.

UNI trades at about 2.2 times annualised fees and about 29 times protocol revenue, and the gap between those figures is the 7.7% take rate. A Coinbase-style multiple applies to fees the business keeps, while Uniswap passes more than 90% of its fees to liquidity providers.

Reaching $100 therefore needs either the 37-fold growth in pool assets to arrive on schedule, or a higher take rate that LPs are willing to tolerate.

Some caveats on this:

• Competition from smaller DEXs

• Difficulty of winning real-world asset flow without established tradfi ties

• V4 hooks that have never been tested at the volumes his model assumes

Kendrick’s August upgrade leaned on Robinhood Chain, whose weekly fees have since fallen by more than half, and his flow thesis assumes permissioned tokenised assets that make up a small share of Uniswap’s revenue today.

What the note shows most clearly is method. A global bank now builds a multi-year target for a DEX token from fees, supply and a comparable listed exchange, which is the tradfi half of the revenue meta arriving in practice.

UNI’s Multiple Is Still At A Premium Compared To Rivals

A token that holds its multiple through a move of that size was already trading at a premium. The competitive table shows how large that premium is.

Total DEX volume over the last 30 days was $274.1 billion, and Uniswap took 33.4% of it, which is more than PancakeSwap, Pump, Aero, BisonFi and Raydium combined.

Provide a caption (optional)

(Source: DefiLlama protocol pages, 25 September 2026. Pump’s figures include launchpad fees. Aero’s revenue includes external bribes.)

The underlying figures:

• Pancake Swap generated $22.64 million in fees and $7.38 million in revenue on $29 billion of volume, against a $875.17 million MC

• Pumpfun generated $160 million in fees and $53.62 million in revenue on $21.187 billion of volume, with a MC of $1.819 billion

• Aero generated $17.74 million in fees and $14.33 million in revenue on $13.262 billion of volume, with a MC of $705.96 million.

Uniswap charges the most per trade and keeps the least of it. It collects about 23 basis points of fees per dollar of volume, compared with about 8 on PancakeSwap, yet only 7.7% of those fees reach the protocol. Pump earns 3.3 times Uniswap’s revenue on less than a quarter of its volume, at a third of its market cap.

One line in Uniswap’s favour doesn’t show up in the table.

Based on incentives, Uniswap spent $144,757 in the last 30 days, while Aero spent $11.39 million, which absorbs most of what its voters earn. Uniswap’s revenue is close to clean, while most rivals pay emissions to keep their volume.

One can still argue that it does not justify three to ten times the multiple on today’s revenue. The case here is that the premium makes more sense as a price on distribution. Uniswap is the venue new chains install at genesis - Robinhood Chain and Arc both chose it within weeks of each other, and no competitor in the table has a record of that kind of placement.

UNI Is A Claim On Every Chain That Chooses Uniswap First

Owning UNI now means holding a claim on the take rate at every settlement layer that installs Uniswap as its default venue. Two major chains did that within weeks of each other this year, and Uniswap spent almost nothing on incentives to win either placement.

Even the softest week in the data makes the case. Weekly revenue of $3.02 million annualises to about $157 million, roughly three times the first-half pace, and it arrived while Robinhood Chain’s share fell to 39% and other chains filled the gap. Arc’s $4.39 million in fees is still outside the burn, one governance vote away.s that sit outside the burn, waiting on a single governance vote.

For me, this is where Uniswap extends the revenue meta instead of just joining it.

My case has always been that capital settles on tokens that behave like claims on cash flow. Uniswap adds something most revenue tokens can’t offer: the cash flow can be audited every day on-chain, tied to a verifiable mechanism for holders, and now surrounded by the infrastructure institutions need before they commit size.

Each of those removes a reason for a traditional buyer to say no. None of them makes UNI cheap today, and I’d expect the multiple to swing hard along the way.

Overall, the direction still looks clear to me. Each new chain Uniswap switches on makes the revenue line broader and easier to model, and a broader, easier-to-model revenue line is exactly what a traditional buyer needs to underwrite a position. That makes UNI one of the first DeFi tokens a traditional fund could plausibly defend in an investment memo.

This article is purely for informational purposes only and does not construe any buy/sell advice. Always DYOR.

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A place where both yield and points farmooors can enjoy the treat!

It's time for Yield Collective No.57

Bring your wallet, let’s eat!

1) Bitwise PPLUS leveraged RWA vault

This walks through Ember’s PPLUS USDC vault curated by Bitwise.

Supply side around 16% before leverage, borrow cheap, max LTV lets a loop land near 35% APY 👇

2) PT-fxSAVE / USDC Morpho loop

The PT-fxSAVE/USDC loop on Morpho is one of the cleaner stable farms.

Fixed PT yield plus cheap USDC borrows, one-click via Yieldz 👇

3) Base / multi-chain vault recap

Here’s a useful snapshot rather than a single ticker.

On Base, Beefy’s USDC-AERO vault sat at 23.85% and Veranta’s avUSDC yield vault at 13.69%.

A few other sleeves in the 4–11% range if you want less LP risk 👇

4) Navi protocol stable / RWA pools

There are a few Navi Protocol pools that were printing 10%+ on Ethereum stables plus a 7.2% RWA sleeve.

Not the flashiest numbers this week, but straightforward if you already sit in that stack 👇

5) Zama x Morpho confidential vaults

Steakhouse Prime USDC stays at a fixed 7.2% against bluechips.

The Flowdesk USDT option on Zama runs 11-12% APY with a wider collateral set 👇

6) Farm smart no.97

This latest idle-stables has options from Boros at 28.1% fixed, Pendle NGI+ at 32.26%, Upshift’s NEMO USDC Prime at 24.49%, plus Morpho USDC at 15.41% on Base and Kamino reUSD/USDC at 19.15%.

Many more options inside 👇

Reads from the week that stayed with me:

> Arc’s casino emptied but another sector boomed

> Prepping for a full bull cycle

> The bluechip curse needs to be lifted

> A triggered autist is a danger too much

Don’t miss out 👇

1) What Is Left After Arc’s Casino Emptied in a Week?

One in 294 tokens on Arc cleared the launchpad finish line.

The casino emptied in a week but lending still took $350M while the tokenised funds Arc was built for barely show up 👇

2) Beginners Guide to the Bull Cycle of 2026

Fifty-plus venture cheques and the winners were the liquid tokens bought at the bottom or OTC with a short vest. Time in the market beat timing it.

More to uncover 👇

3) BTC:ETH::ZEC:NEAR

2026 ZEC is cast as 2021 ETH.

NEAR is collecting the leftover smart-contract bid.

The hard question is who still buys the blue chips like BTC and ETH? 👇

4) One Autist vs. A $40 Billion Company

A Kalshi employee told a trader to cope. The trader answered with filings, open interest that did not match volume, and a WSJ piece.

Three words may prove very expensive 👇

5) Digital Assets After CLARITY: The Best Protection Is Adoption

Better to take SEC and CFTC relief than lock in CLARITY’s stablecoin-reward limits and a 25-person sandbox.

A law can freeze a restriction as easily as a right.

The hedge is 50 million people already using the products a future administration would have to take away 👇

6) The Art of executing a good long term trade.

Hyperliquid made $871M and ran the largest onchain buyback, and it still issued more tokens than it removed.

Last year’s buy against next year’s unlock is the number that matters.

Here’s a list of similar protocols you should take note 👇

7) What Happens When Memecoins Trade Against Real Shares?

An unbacked Farmmi clone moved the real Nasdaq stock 26.5 percent on 17,000 times normal volume.

The properly backed tokens that ran even harder left their shares almost untouched.

Deeper into the story 👇

In brief: Arc borrowed the same playbook that filled Robinhood Chain with traders. One week in, the crowd is gone and $350M is sitting in another sector.

Out of every token minted on Circle’s new chain in its first month, one in 294 reached the market cap its launchpad set as the finish line. The other 293 stalled, bled out, or died in the pool they launched into.

A 0.34% graduation rate is akin to a verdict, delivered in seven days, on the crowd that showed up expecting a casino and the chain that was never built to be one.

Circle opened Arc public mainnet on 16 Sep 2026, with many big name partners as validators and pillars to support a robust economy on Arc. It was pitched for tokenised assets and institutional rails.

While the brief described one chain, the first week delivered another, then quietly began sorting itself into a third.

The Launch Pulled 400,000 Wallets And Lost 82% Of Them In A Week

Day one ran hot in every metric that measures noise:

• Arc processed 7.76 million transactions and cleared $410.82 million in DEX volume, of which memecoin launchpads drove roughly 82%.

• Active wallets hit 409,150, against a pre-mainnet base of around 10,850 a day.

• Traders minted 97,025 tokens in a single day, and one pad, Argus, accounted for more than 86% of them.

Robinhood Chain, the closest precedent for a corporate-backed chain launching into a memecoin rush, cleared just $14.74 million in DEX volume on its own opening day in July. Arc’s debut ran nearly 28 times larger due to the hype built around it - many were ready for the punts.

Then the crowd left, and every noise metric fell on the same slope:

• DEX volume dropped from $410.82 million to $117.98 million on day two, $71.17 million by day four, and has settled near $50 million

• Daily active wallets fell 409,150 to 194,290 to 122,510 to roughly 72,000 by 22 September

• Transactions dropped from 7.76 million to 1.14 million over the same window

The trading terminals that route this kind of flow, GMGN, Axiom, Fomo, basedbot, confirm the exodus rather than complicate it. Combined daily terminal volume peaked above $230 million on launch day and flatlined to single-digit millions within four days. The wallets that came to snipe launches did what snipers do when the launches stop graduating: they stopped opening the app.

The floor it settled onto is the part the collapse hides.

A week after the peak drained, Arc still holds roughly 72,000 daily active wallets, seven times the pre-launch base of 10,850. The casino emptied without emptying back to where it started.

Most of the crowd that arrived to gamble is gone, and a residue many times the original chain stayed.

The Launchpad Economy That Dominated Now Holds A Small Amount Of TVL

The pads were the whole story on launch and became a fainting shadow 1 week after. Total value locked across every launchpad on Arc now sits ~$335K, smaller than a single mid-tier memecoin’s liquidity on Solana.

The revenue ranking over the first 30 days shows how narrow the survivor list is:

• Argus Pad led all pads at $293,497, with GMGN, a trading app rather than a pad, taking $202,123.

• Below the top two the drop is a cliff:

  Foci $18,126, Tolly $2,494, Solonlabs1 $2,314, akadotfun $1,069, ARK Launch $601, Wonk Fun $291.

• Most pads have generated under a dollar of revenue in a rolling 24-hour window, and several have never generated any.

The graduation rate explains the exodus.

At 0.34% over 30 days, Arc’s pads converted launches into graduated tokens at a rate that gives a sniper almost no reason to keep playing. The Solana launchpads this format was copied from have historically graduated in the low single digits, and even that was considered a punishing casino.

Arc offered worse odds on a chain where the house had no memecoin culture to sustain the game once launch-week liquidity thinned.

None of this is a Circle failure in the way the volume charts imply. Circle did not build launchpads, court snipers, or promise a memecoin season. The pads wanted to launch on a stablecoin settlement chain because a new chain with fresh liquidity is where the launch-and-dump game goes next, and Arc’s USDC gas removed the friction of a volatile token in the process.

I argued before Arc launched that its real test was not whether a crowd would show up but whether one could be manufactured, held, and made to trade against assets that did not exist on the chain the day before.

The pre-launch bet from the social-trading apps was that being early to Arc would let them capture that crowd the way they captured Robinhood’s. Being early was necessary and it was not enough.

The crowd arrived, the apps were waiting for it on day one as promised, and it drained anyway, because there was nothing to hold it once the launches stopped graduating. A crowd you cannot retain was never really yours.

So what did the capital that ignored the casino entirely decide to do instead?

The Money That Stayed Went Into What Arc Was Built For

While DEX volume fell 87%, total value locked on Arc rose.

It stands at ~$381 million, near its highest level since launch.

Stablecoin market cap on the chain sits at $632.97 million, 99% of it USDC.

Capital accumulated through the exact week trading collapsed, the inverse of what a chain looks like when a crowd abandons it.

Where that capital sits complicates the good news because two renowned lending protocols hold almost the entire chain:

• Morpho Blue at $205.2 million and Aave V4 at $145.43 million, roughly $350 million of a $381 million total.

• Every other category, spot DEXs, cross-chain bridges, yield aggregators, the launchpads, splits the remaining $30 million.

Arc is not, one week in, a diversified financial ecosystem, and looks like a split of two credit markets and a long tail sidekicks.

That concentration has a precedent worth taking seriously. When Robinhood Chain launched in July, roughly 90% of its first-week TVL sat in a single Morpho vault, fed largely by one approximately $50 million Ethena deposit.

A stacked-launch chain’s opening TVL is often one or two large allocators rather than a distributed base, and the shape of Arc’s book - $205 million in Morpho, $145 million in Aave, with nothing else close - rhymes with that pattern closely enough that the burden of proof sits on anyone claiming otherwise. Deep lending TVL and broad institutional adoption are not the same thing, and the first is easy to mistake for the second.

The absence in that TVL breakdown also speaks volume. Arc was built to host BlackRock’s BUIDL, Circle’s USYC, Janus Henderson’s tokenised funds, the real-world assets that justify a permissioned validator set of banks and clearinghouses.

One week in, RWA does not appear in the chain’s top TVL categories at all.

Circle Gateway, the official bridge those institutional flows would route through, holds $602,000. The tokenised-fund story that is the entire reason Arc exists as a permissioned chain rather than another open L1 is, so far, a set of announcements rather than a line on the TVL chart.

The Gears Have Changed

The past week shapes Arc as 3 chains stacked on one another, running at their own pace.

There was a ‘memecoin chain’, which burned bright for a day and is now embers. The trading crowd went where trading crowds always go when the odds turn: somewhere else, fast, having provided the launch-week liquidity that let the pads print their fees.

There is a ‘lending chain’, which absorbed $350 million while the ‘memecoin chain’ was busy and is the only part currently doing real volume of any kind.

And there is the ‘institutional settlement chain’ Circle actually pitched, which has not shown up in the data yet and may take quarters, given that DTCC’s own tokenisation target sits in the second half of 2027.

Robinhood proved a corporate chain can borrow a crowd and, unusually, keep enough of it to reach a $3.7 billion single day weeks after launch.

Arc so far has proved it can borrow a crowd lose it on schedule, while accumulating a lending book that suggests the more patient capital sees something worth parking dollars in.

Which of those is the truer signal depends entirely on whether the tokenised funds arrive to use the settlement rails the lending markets are currently the only tenants of.

A chain built for institutions that fills up with memecoins looks like a failure.

A chain built for institutions that empties of memecoins and fills up with lending looks like a beginning.

Seven days is enough to see the crowd leave but it is not enough to see whether the institutions were ever going to show.

This article is purely for informational purposes only and does not construe any buy/sell advice. Always DYOR.

If you found this useful, subscribe for more breakdowns of the infrastructure and capital flows shaping crypto. I write these so you can see the mechanics before the narrative catches up.

A place where both yield and points farmooors can enjoy the treat!

It's time for Yield Collective No.56

Bring your wallet, let’s eat!

1) Azuro USDT pool on Polygon

Amid a busy shipping week, here’s a straightforward USDT LP on Azuro Protocol (Polygon) at 16.76% APR.

In this list also notes a 9.36% APR pool on Beets fi / Sonic if you want a second look 👇

2) INF loop inside Jupiter mobile

Here’s an INF Loop strategy inside Jupiter mobile showing 8.92% APY.

Swap USDC → INF, then the borrow-and-loop runs in-app 👇

3) Monad to Ethereum stables

Here’s a usable pool list next to the DEX volume print.

Stable-side picks run from MentoLabs GBPm–USDm at 25.47% APR on Monad, to Brix Money wiTRY at 14.56% and Alchemix Fi USDC at 10.33% 👇

4) T-bill spread check: sUSDai, Bitwise AUSD, ONyc

Here are three yields stacked against T-bills at ~4%: sUSDai at ~7% net, Bitwise’s Premium RWA AUSD vault on Morpho at ~8.9%, and $ONyc at ~11.5%.

The useful bit is the exit lag and the sUSDai overlap inside the Bitwise vault, not just the headline rates 👇

5) PT-USDat / USDC loop on Morpho

There’s a PT-USDat/USDC loop on Morpho with USDat’s PYUSD backing.

At max leverage the setup is printing up to 39% APY.

Note: size and liquidation risk still matter here 👇

6) Base yield map (lending, LPs, stock tokens, Pendle)

A mapping of where Base yield is actually coming from: Aave and Morpho lending, LP pairs, Coinbase stock tokens, Pendle PT/YT, and what looping pays or costs right now 👇

This week sits on both ends of the barbell:

> One side is taking profit and asking when enough is enough

> The card which has 359x in indexed growth

> An integration which could bring about 9-figs in revenue

Start with the list 👇

1) How A Deeper Robinhood Integration Sends LIT To $40

Everyone is staring at the LIT unlock calendar.

The other side of the sheet is Robinhood already routing perps through Lighter, with options as a second engine that has not even started 👇

2) The Art of Exiting a Trade

Buying is the part people want to narrate.

A trade is only finished when some of the money leaves.

You do not need the exact high, what you need is enough cash that missing it no longer matters 👇

3) Glasscade Research: Plasma One - The Card That Filled Up The Chain

Plasma One’s tracked card spend went up 31% month on month with returning wallets still about half the base.

Acquisition is solved. The open test is whether ticket size and habit deepen once the signup reward cools 👇

4) The Trojan Horse: How Cardone Capital Turns Apartment Buildings into Amplified Bitcoin

Grant Cardone is stuffing Bitcoin into all-cash apartment funds, then refinancing the building so the coin sleeve quietly becomes a bigger share of leftover equity.

The amplification on the sponsor’s own capital can look closer to 4x than 1x. The building is the Trojan horse and the coin is the juice. 👇

5) AI Agents + Money = A New Economy? 7 Projects Making It Happen

Stripe, Mastercard and Visa are no longer touring the rails but buying the wallets and settling in stablecoins.

Tradfi fees assume a person at checkout, which is fatal when an agent spends 31 cents a call.

The remaining bet is who owns the processor, the passport and the route before that traffic is captured.

Some projects to check out 👇

6) What to Build in Solana DeFi: 10 Ideas for 2026

Solana now holds $16B in stablecoins and $4.2B in tokenised RWAs. Supply is no longer the bottleneck.

Next ideas to build?

Find a consumer wedge for onchain equities, yield that does not need crypto volume, and a clearing layer that nets risk across venues 👇

7) The Creator Renaissance

The creator economy still lives on ads.

The next layer is markets around people - calls, taste, access, momentum - can crypto is trying to turn those opinions into positions