Do Fundamentals Matter in Crypto Markets?

Introduction

There are a number of crypto projects that generate revenue and simultaneously reward their users and token holders. Sometimes they use the revenue to create value accrual, and sometimes users/token holders are rewarded with emissions.

For the uninitiated, you may have seen high APRs for staking a protocol’s token, and you may have thought it looks quite lucrative. But more often than not, the APY/APR being offered is unsustainable, largely because these yields are not a byproduct of protocol revenue, but are partly or entirely fueled by token emissions.

Some of these protocols have revenue but do not use it to generate value for the token. Most barely have any revenue but incentivize token holders to lock their assets in a staking contract purely through emission-based rewards. In this report, we focus on protocols with real revenue generation — the top 10 protocols by revenue over the last si