Crypto Twitter talks about tokens and prices. DefiLlama's open data tells a quieter story about where the fees are actually paid. On 6 November 2026 I pulled five of its datasets as flat tables: TVL by chain, top protocols, stablecoins, DEX volumes, and fees and revenue.
Disclosure: I built the export tool used here, DefiLlama DeFi Data Export on Apify. All numbers come from DefiLlama's public API; this is data, not investment advice.
1. The biggest "DeFi" earners are stablecoin issuers
Fees over the last 30 days, top 5 by 24-hour fees:
| Protocol | Category | Fees, last 30 days |
|---|---|---|
| Tether | Stablecoin issuer | $518.9M |
| Circle (USDC) | Stablecoin issuer | $207.0M |
| PumpSwap | DEX | $91.6M |
| Hyperliquid Perps | Derivatives | $85.6M |
| Polymarket US | Prediction market | $83.8M |
Tether alone booked $518.9M in fees in 30 days. The 13 protocols ranked 3 to 15 by daily fees made about $524M combined. So one stablecoin issuer earns roughly as much as the next thirteen crypto protocols together, including Uniswap, Aave, Lido, pump.fun and Polymarket.
The reason is simple, and it is not a DeFi mechanism at all. A stablecoin issuer holds dollar reserves, mostly short-term government debt, and keeps the interest. In DefiLlama's accounting that interest counts as fees and revenue. With roughly $177 billion of USDT in circulation, even ordinary interest rates add up to hundreds of millions a month.
2. Stablecoins are bigger than all of DeFi
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Total value locked in DeFi (all chains) | ≈ $81B |
| USDT in circulation | $177.0B |
| USDC in circulation | $70.5B |
| All stablecoins (from DefiLlama's chain breakdown, 5 Nov) | ≈ $292B |
The money parked in stablecoins is about 3.6 times the total value locked in DeFi protocols. Most stablecoins are not "in DeFi" at all. They sit in exchange accounts and wallets, or move between them as a payment and settlement layer. If you want to understand crypto's real-world use in 2026, the stablecoin numbers say more than the TVL charts.
Below the big two, the list shows how mainstream the issuers have become: Ripple (RLUSD, $2.7B), PayPal (PYUSD, $2.7B), BlackRock's tokenized fund (BUIDL, $1.9B) and World Liberty Financial's USD1 ($3.6B) are all in the top 10.
3. Ethereum still holds half of DeFi, but the next tier has changed
TVL by chain:
| # | Chain | TVL | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ethereum | $43.0B | 53.3% |
| 2 | Base | $5.8B | 7.2% |
| 3 | Solana | $5.3B | 6.6% |
| 4 | BSC | $5.1B | 6.3% |
| 5 | Tron | $5.0B | 6.2% |
| 6 | Bitcoin | $4.0B | 5.0% |
| 7 | Hyperliquid L1 | $2.4B | 3.0% |
| 8 | Arbitrum | $1.4B | 1.8% |
| 9 | Robinhood Chain | $1.1B | 1.3% |
| 10 | Monad | $1.0B | 1.2% |
Ethereum still holds more than half of all value locked. Behind it, positions 2 to 5 sit within $1B of each other. The new names are the interesting part. Robinhood Chain has passed $1B, and Monad, Arc and Plasma, the latter two built for payments and stablecoins, are all in the top 15. Exchanges, brokers and payment companies are now running their own chains.
4. Prediction markets make real money
Polymarket appears twice in the fee top 15: the US entity with $83.8M in 30-day fees and the international one with $34.3M. Kalshi is among the top 5 venues by volume in the DEX dataset. Whatever you think of betting on events, prediction markets are no longer a niche experiment. By fees, they are on par with the largest exchanges and lending protocols.
How to pull this data yourself
The DefiLlama API is free and public. The export tool turns the eight most useful endpoints into flat, spreadsheet-ready rows:
curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/fast_data_asap~defillama-defi-data/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"dataset": "fees_revenue", "topN": 15}'
Datasets: protocols, chains_tvl, protocol_history, stablecoins, stablecoin_chains, dex_volumes, fees_revenue, yields. Each row carries a snapshotAt timestamp, so a daily schedule builds a time series in Google Sheets or a database. It costs $0.0002 per row; the five pulls for this article were under 100 rows. Please also respect DefiLlama's rate limits and credit them as the source.
A quick way to reproduce the Tether comparison in Python:
rows = [...] # fees_revenue rows, topN 15
tether = next(r for r in rows if r["protocol"] == "Tether")["fees30dUsd"]
rest = sum(r["fees30dUsd"] for r in rows if r["rank"] >= 3)
print(f"Tether: ${tether/1e6:.1f}M, ranks 3-15 combined: ${rest/1e6:.1f}M")
Data: DefiLlama public API, snapshot of 6 November 2026 (stablecoin total from the chain breakdown of 5 November). Figures change daily. Nothing here is financial advice.
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