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Protocol economics
A protocol fee is charged by software rather than billed by a company, and the payer, the currency and the recipient are three separate facts.
01 — What a protocol fee is, and who actually pays it
A protocol fee is charged by software rather than billed by a company, and the payer, the currency and the recipient are three separate facts.
6 min
02 — Fees versus revenue, and who keeps the money
One payment splits into a supply-side share, a protocol share and sometimes a holder share; reporting only the first number describes almost nothing.
7 min
03 — Take rate: what a high or a low one implies
Take rate is the share of user fees a protocol retains, and both a high reading and a low one have several possible mechanical causes.
6 min
04 — Total value locked, and the double-counting problem
TVL is a dollar valuation of deposited assets, which means it moves with prices, and the same dollar can legitimately appear in several places at once.
7 min
05 — DEX volume: the most abused number in the sector
Reported trading volume is easy to manufacture, easy to double count, and mostly generated by machines rather than by people wanting to trade.
7 min
06 — Stablecoin supply on a chain as a demand measure
Dollar-denominated balances hosted on a network measure willingness to hold value there without depending on the price of the network's own token.
6 min
07 — An address is not a person: reading active addresses
Active addresses counts identifiers that transacted, and the relationship between identifiers and human beings runs in both directions at once.
6 min
08 — Revenue quality: concentration, incentives, durability
Two protocols reporting the same retained revenue can be entirely different businesses once the payers, the subsidies and the switching costs are examined.
8 min
09 — Never add a chain's economics to an application's
Chains and the applications running on them are separate layers with separate tokens, and summing their fees counts the same activity twice.
7 min
10 — Why protocol revenue is not income-statement revenue
The word is borrowed from accounting, but the measurement, the entity, the cost side and the legal claim behind it are all missing or different.
8 min