After the tide recedes: Which Web3 projects are still making money?

After the bubble bursts, what is the bottom line for the survival of crypto projects?

In an era where anything could be a story and anything could be overvalued, cash flow didn't seem essential. But things are different now.

VCs are withdrawing, and liquidity is tightening. In this market environment, the ability to make money and the presence of positive cash flow have become the first sieve to test a project's fundamentals.

On the other hand, some projects rely on stable income to weather the cycle. According to DeFiLlama data, in October 2025, the top three crypto projects by revenue generated $688 million (Tether), $237 million (Circle), and $102 million (Hyperliquid) respectively in one month.

This article will discuss projects with real cash flow. They mostly revolve around two things: transactions and attention. These two fundamental sources of value in the business world are no exception in the cryptocurrency world. Centralized Exchanges: The Most Stable Revenue Model In the cryptocurrency world, it's no secret that "exchanges are the most profitable." The main sources of revenue for exchanges include transaction fees and listing fees. Take Binance as an example; its daily spot and futures trading volume has consistently accounted for 30-40% of the entire market. Even in 2022, the year with the lowest market activity, its annual revenue reached $12 billion, and during this bull market cycle, its revenue will only be higher. (Data from CryptoQuant) In short: as long as there are traders, exchanges will generate revenue. Another example is Coinbase. As a publicly traded company, its data disclosure is more transparent. In the third quarter of 2025, Coinbase's revenue was $1.9 billion, and its net profit was $433 million. Transaction revenue was the main source, contributing more than half, with the remaining revenue coming from subscription and service revenue, etc. Other leading exchanges like Kraken and OKX are also steadily making money; Kraken reportedly had revenue of approximately $1.5 billion in 2024. The biggest advantage of these CEXs is that trading naturally generates revenue. Compared to many projects still struggling to make their business models viable, they are already genuinely charging for services. In other words, in this phase where storytelling is increasingly difficult and hot money is dwindling, CEXs are among the few players who can survive without needing to raise funds and solely on their own. On-chain projects: PerpDex, stablecoins, public chains. According to DefiLlama data as of November 27, 2025, the top ten on-chain protocols with the highest revenue in the past 30 days are shown in the figure. As can be seen from this, Tether and Circle firmly hold the top positions. Leveraging the interest rate spread between US Treasury bonds and USDT and USDC, these two stablecoin issuers earned nearly $1 billion in a single month. Following closely behind is Hyperliquid, firmly holding the title of "most profitable on-chain derivatives protocol." Furthermore, the rapid rise of projects like Pumpfun once again validates the old logic that "selling coins is worse than trading them, and selling tools is worse than selling shovels" still holds true in the crypto industry. It's worth noting that emerging projects such as Axiom Pro and Lighter, while not boasting large overall revenue, have also established positive cash flow paths. 2.1 PerpDex: The Real Profits of On-Chain Protocols This year, the most outstanding PerpDex is Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid is a decentralized perpetual contract platform using an independent chain and its own matching mechanism. Its explosive growth was quite sudden; in August 2025 alone, it completed a transaction volume of $383 billion, generating $106 million in revenue. Furthermore, the project uses 32% of its revenue to buy back and burn platform tokens. According to a report by @wublockchain12 yesterday, the Hyperliquid team unlocked 1.75 million HYPE (60.4 million), without external financing or selling pressure, using protocol revenue to buy back tokens. For an on-chain project, this is already close to the revenue efficiency of a CEX. More importantly, Hyperliquid truly earns money and then gives it back to the token economy system, establishing a direct link between protocol revenue and token value. Now let's talk about Uniswap. In the past few years, Uniswap has been criticized for taking a cut from token holders, for example, charging 0.3% on each transaction but giving it all to LPs, leaving UNI holders with no income whatsoever. Until November 2025, Uniswap announced plans to implement a protocol fee sharing mechanism and use a portion of its historical revenue to buy back and burn UNI tokens. According to calculations, if this mechanism had been implemented earlier, as much as $150 million could have been burned in the first ten months of this year alone. Upon the announcement, UNI surged 40% that day. Although Uniswap's market share has dropped from a peak of 60% to 15%, this proposal may still reshape UNI's fundamental logic. However, after the proposal was released, @EmberCN detected that a UNI investment institution (possibly a Variant Fund) transferred millions of $UNI ($27.08 million) to Coinbase Prime, suspected of pumping and dumping. Overall, the DEX model that relied on airdrops to manipulate prices is becoming increasingly unsustainable. Only projects that truly generate stable revenue and complete their business cycle can truly retain users. 2.2 Stablecoins and Public Chains: Earning Money Through Interest Beyond trading-related projects, a number of infrastructure projects are also continuously attracting investment. Among these, stablecoin issuers and frequently used public chains are the most typical. Tether: A Giant of Continuous Money Printing The company behind USDT, Tether, has a very simple profit model: whenever someone deposits $1 in exchange for USDT, Tether uses that money to buy low-risk assets such as government bonds and short-term notes to generate interest, which it keeps. With global interest rate hikes, Tether's returns have also increased. Tether's net profit reached $13.4 billion in 2024 and is projected to exceed $15 billion in 2025, approaching that of traditional financial giants like Goldman Sachs. @Phyrex_Ni recently posted that despite its rating downgrade, Tether remains a cash cow, earning over $130 billion in collateral from US Treasury bonds. While USDC issuer Circle has a slightly smaller circulating supply and net profit, its total revenue in 2024 still exceeded $1.6 billion, with 99% coming from interest income. It's worth noting that Circle's profit margin isn't as exaggerated as Tether's, partly due to its revenue sharing with Coinbase. In short, stablecoin issuers are essentially money-printing machines; they don't raise funds through storytelling, but rather through users' willingness to deposit their money with them. In a bear market, these savings-oriented projects thrive even more. @BTCdayu also believes stablecoins are a good business, printing money and collecting interest worldwide, and is optimistic about Circle as the king of passive income in stablecoins. Public Chains: Relying on Traffic, Not Incentives Looking at mainnet public chains, the most direct way to monetize is through gas fees. The following data comes from Nansen.ai: Over the past year, if we only look at the total transaction fee revenue of public chains, we can more clearly see which chains have truly generated practical value. Ethereum's annual revenue was $739 million, remaining its primary revenue source, but it declined by 71% year-over-year due to the Dencun upgrade and L2 cache diversion. In contrast, Solana's annual revenue reached $719 million, a 26% year-over-year increase, driven by the Meme and AI Agent boom, resulting in a significant increase in user activity and interaction frequency. Tron's revenue was $628 million, a 18% year-over-year increase. Bitcoin's annual revenue was $207 million, mainly affected by a decline in inscription trading activity, resulting in a significant overall drop. BNB Chain's annual revenue reached $264 million, a 38% year-over-year increase, ranking first among mainstream public chains in terms of growth rate. Although its revenue scale is still lower than ETH, SOL, and TRX, combined with the growth in its transaction volume and active addresses, it can be seen that its on-chain use cases are expanding and its user structure is becoming more diversified. BNB Chain as a whole demonstrates strong user retention and genuine demand. This stable and growing revenue structure also provides clearer support for the continuous evolution of its ecosystem. These public blockchains are like "water sellers"; whoever is seeking fortune in the market will always need their water, electricity, and roads. While these infrastructure projects may lack short-term explosive growth, their strength lies in their stability and resilience to economic cycles.

Businesses Surrounding KOLs: Attention Can Be Monetized

If transactions and infrastructure are the overt business models, then the attention economy is the "hidden business" in the crypto world, such as KOLs, agencies, etc.

Since the beginning of this year, crypto KOLs have become centers of attention traffic.

Influential figures active on platforms like Twitter, Telegram, and YouTube leverage their personal influence to develop diversified revenue models: from paid promotions and community subscriptions to monetizing courses—a range of traffic-driven businesses. Industry rumors suggest that mid-tier and above crypto KOLs can earn up to $10,000 per month through promotions. Meanwhile, audiences are demanding higher-quality content, so KOLs who weather economic cycles are often creators who have earned user trust through professionalism, sound judgment, or deep engagement. This has also indirectly driven a reshuffling of the content ecosystem during bear markets, with impulsive creators exiting and long-term thinkers remaining. Of particular note is the third layer of attention monetization: KOL funding rounds. This makes KOLs key participants in the primary market: acquiring project tokens at discounted prices, undertaking traffic exposure tasks, and exchanging "early-stage capital gained through influence"—a model that bypasses venture capital. A whole set of matchmaking services has emerged around KOLs themselves. Agencies have begun to play the role of traffic intermediaries, matching projects with suitable KOLs. The entire process is increasingly resembling an advertising placement system. If you are interested in the business models of KOLs and agencies, you can refer to our previous long article, "Unveiling the KOL Round: A Wealth Experiment Driven by Traffic" (https://x.com/BiteyeCN/status/1986748741592711374), to gain a deeper understanding of the real interest structure behind it. In short, the attention economy is essentially a monetization of trust, and trust is even scarcer in a bear market, making the monetization threshold even higher.

Conclusion

Projects that can maintain cash flow during the crypto winter largely confirm the two cornerstones of "transactions" and "attention".

On the one hand, whether centralized or decentralized, as long as there is stable user trading behavior, a continuous income can be obtained through transaction fees.

This direct business model allows them to remain self-sufficient even when capital exits. On the other hand, KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) who focus on user attention monetize user value through advertising and services. In the future, we may see more diverse models, but in any case, projects that have accumulated real revenue during periods of market downturn will have a greater chance of leading new development. Conversely, some projects that rely solely on storytelling and lack the ability to generate revenue may experience a short-term surge in popularity, but ultimately, they may be forgotten.