DeFi business revenue falls third quarter in a row as CoinShares data shows Q1 total at nearly $588 million after a 2025 peak.
DeFi revenue among top protocols is starting to lose some steam after a strong run through 2025.
The revenue numbers for leading DeFi protocols have slowed their momentum after a good year in 2025, with CoinShares and Token Terminal estimating Q1 totals at $587.9 million for leading on-chain business.
While this still represents a healthy amount, the revenue numbers have still turned downward, marking the third consecutive quarter of decline.
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Following an impressive high near the $800 million range in mid-2025, the figures cooled off and fell to the end of last year and into this year, according to CoinShares’ findings.
DeFi Business Revenue Cools
Most of the money is still concentrated in a handful of platforms. As the report puts it, revenue is “highly concentrated among a small number of trading platforms and stablecoin issuers.”
Specifically, decentralized perpetuals crypto exchange Hyperliquid recorded roughly $178.7 million in Q1 revenues, almost all of which (96%) came from trading volume.
- At the same time, part of the recent revenue mix came from newer apps. Platforms like memecoin launchpad pump.fun and other DeFi projects added to the total. But activity there has been uneven and harder to sustain, per the report.
Tokenized Stocks, Stablecoins Hold Positions
Zooming out, some of the bigger segments feeding into DeFi are starting to level off. Stablecoins, which the report calls the “foundational layer of Hybrid Finance,” reached about $297.6 billion in supply in Q1. However, growth was basically flat from the previous quarter at just 0.2%.
Tokenized funds climbed to $9 billion in assets under management, up 12.6% on the quarter, but that’s a slower pace than earlier jumps. A lot of that demand is tied to “low-risk, yield-bearing assets,” mainly short-term U.S. Treasurys, the report reads.
The way the system is set up, that slowdown tends to flow through. As the report explains, DeFi protocols “turn that liquidity into revenue,” meaning less new capital can quickly translate into lower fees downstream.
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