[HN Gopher] A large number of protocols on Ethereum and Solana b...
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       A large number of protocols on Ethereum and Solana blockchains have
       no revenue
        
       Author : PaulHoule
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2025-08-10 21:20 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.coindesk.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.coindesk.com)
        
       | charcircuit wrote:
       | What percentage of businesses have revenue, including dissolved
       | businesses?
       | 
       | 12% and 25% is higher than I would have predicted since I'd
       | suspect most to fail.
        
       | daft_pink wrote:
       | You'd think that smart contracts would have very high levels of
       | inactivity and once you create a smart contract it's impractical
       | for it to be depracated.
        
       | alphazard wrote:
       | This is a statistic that no one asked for and no one should care
       | about. How much L2 value is transacted every day on each ledger?
       | is a _much_ better first question. A good second question is how
       | that value is distributed amongst the various L2 protocols.
        
         | chrisco255 wrote:
         | Defi Llama is generally a good source for this info:
         | https://defillama.com/
        
       | latchkey wrote:
       | The tone of the article sounds like an attempt to make news out
       | of nothing, while ETH is nearing ATH's.
       | 
       | Years ago, we went through a DeFi summer where a ton of protocols
       | were built. Then, multiple years of nothing as the summer ended.
       | 
       | Since then, many of the protocols condensed into a few very very
       | active protocols. Turtle has $1.1B deployed in only two
       | campaigns. AAVE has $55B. Morpho has $10B. There are tons more
       | protocols doing just fine.
        
         | bo1024 wrote:
         | Yeah, this is odd, a bit like calling out the percent of
         | registered web domains that don't generate revenue.
        
       | moomin wrote:
       | Is there really a security exposure to protocols you don't
       | yourself employ? How do protocols get updated? Can they be EOLed?
       | Turns out there's a lot I don't know about Ethereum.
        
         | baobun wrote:
         | It depends.
         | 
         | Say you're participating in a lending protocol utilizing some
         | form of on-chain price oracles (ie smart contracts exposing
         | updating data), such that gaming of some particular third
         | decentralized exchange would manipulate the pricing data and
         | could thereby affect your position (triggering liquidation or
         | whatnot).
         | 
         | Say you're holding some on-chain stablecoin backed by other
         | tokens. Issues with contracts of those tokens could tank their
         | value and thereby affecting your stablecoin value.
         | 
         | It all comes down to introduction of points of trust in
         | interconnected systems. Tale as old as time.
        
       | mcintyre1994 wrote:
       | I don't really understand the angle they're going for here. I'd
       | expect that most of these are just abandoned products that failed
       | to become a viable business, and don't claim to employ anybody.
       | You could get a similar stat if you looked at projects that have
       | used AWS or something like that.
        
         | baobun wrote:
         | A lot of them have never intended to be businesses or revenue-
         | yielding in the first place.
        
           | j45 wrote:
           | Especially if a lot of them are ideas being explored and not
           | coming from a business background or use case.
           | 
           | When businesses with their use cases start using something
           | like this, I'd say watch out, but the reality is it might
           | just be invisible and just print the same receipt we're used
           | to.
        
       | raffy wrote:
       | why are we debating ai slop from a
       | [dude](https://www.coindesk.com/author/omkar-godbole) who wrote
       | about XRP in the last 2 of 4 articles?
        
       | wslh wrote:
       | CoinDesk is ignoring the elephant in the room: for most protocol
       | owners, revenue is almost irrelevant. Early investors in crypto
       | startups often get tokens worth many times their cash investment.
       | Once the protocol is live and popular, the money pours in.
       | Vesting rules? A few years is plenty. The real kicker is that
       | there's no transparency about how many tokens these investors
       | get, only the round investment totals make it into public
       | reports.
        
       | chrisco255 wrote:
       | A large number of apps in any ecosystem have little to no
       | revenue. Coindesk discovers the Pareto principle, breaking
       | news...
        
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       (page generated 2025-08-10 23:00 UTC)