Public Chain 2025: The hustle and bustle belongs to the casino, and the calm is left to the ecosystem

Author: BlockWeeks

In the cryptocurrency market, if you only look at the market cap (Market Cap), you'll see a thriving digital utopia where everything is growing. Tens of billion dollar valuations, grand technical white papers, the aura of Turing Award winners... it all seemed like the dawn of the next generation of the internet.

But if you switch to a pair of glasses — one that only looks at “real income on the chain (Fees)”, you'll see a very different, and even chilling, scene: in this so-called trillion-level market, the vast majority of “unicorns” are actually zombies that have long since stopped breathing.

Recently, BlockWeeks analyzed DeFilLama's public chain “Fees” data in detail, and we discovered an unavoidable structural problem: the crypto chain has entered an era of “extreme concentration of profits and long-tail collective zombification.”

The core data in this article all comes from DeFilLama's “Fees/Revenue by Chain” panel (fetched: December 16, 2025). “Fees” as defined by it refers to the total fees (top-line) paid by users on the chain. It is an approximate measure of the scale of on-chain economic activity, not protocol revenue (protocol revenue). The purpose of this article is to examine the on-chain value capture capabilities of each public chain using this open and unified standard.

I. The $17 humiliation: The collapse of a technological utopia

According to our public data scraping DeFilLama, the most alarming number isn't from the million-dollar giant at the top of the list, but rather from $17 at the bottom.

This is Algorand — the “blockchain impossible triangle solver”, a public chain founded by Turing Award winner Silvio Micali, with top technical endorsements. One day's network-wide protocol revenue.

You read that right, it's not $170,000, it's $17.

At the moment, Algorand's market capitalization is still at the level of 1 billion US dollars. In a “digital country” with a market capitalization of 1 billion US dollars, the daily direct tax revenue generated by the digital economy is not enough to buy four lattes at Starbucks. It shows that despite having the most advanced decentralized technology, once there is no real and continuous application demand, its ability to capture economic value will approach zero.

This isn't just Algorand's embarrassment; it's the death knell for the entire “classical public chain” camp.

Take a look at Cardano (ADA), a giant that is in the top ten by market capitalization and has millions of coin holding addresses. However, the data tells us that recently its average daily on-chain fee has only hovered around $6,000. This means that apart from asset transfers and network maintenance guarantees between coin holders, the chain lacks commercial activity that can generate significant fees — no large-scale loans, no high-frequency transactions, and no real, paid value exchange.

These public chains are like luxury empty cities built at huge sums of money in the middle of the desert. The infrastructure is complete, the roads are wide, and the town hall (foundation) is well-funded, but there are no residents (active paying users) on the street. The way they maintain operations is often that the city hall continuously sells reserves (dumped tokens) to pay for operation and maintenance costs.

II. Ugly victory: Who is really capturing value?

Looking at the top of the list, a fact that makes “technological fundamentalists” even more uncomfortable comes to mind: the ones that make the most money are often not the most “elegant” or “decentralized” technology.

Tron (wave field) tops the list, with an average daily processing fee of up to 1.24 million US dollars. In the eyes of many elitists, the wave field may be difficult to call “technology flow.” But the market voted for the ultimate answer: payment is just what you need. Tron carries the vast majority of the world's USDT on-chain transfer requirements. In an industry full of speculation and bubbles, things have gone wrong to become the only payment layer application to be mass adopted (Mass Adoption) — even though it is only a shadow banking channel for fiat money.

Arguably, payment, the oldest and most basic internet requirement, is currently the only mass adoption (mass adoption) in the crypto world. Tron's success is a powerful mockery of all project parties that seek “perfect technology” while ignoring “real requirements.”

It is followed by Solana, which has an average daily processing fee of nearly $600,000. Its logic of success is more straightforward: it is the most active on-chain casino in the world. Meme coins, high-frequency DEX transactions, runaways — these activities contribute most of the fees. Solana's moat is no longer TPS, but “attention flow.” The rise of Base was even more disruptive (around $105,000 per day): it proved that distribution channels (Distribution) are far more important than technology itself. Backed by Coinbase's huge user base, Base dealt a dimensional reduction blow to other L2.

This gave a cruel and clear message: in the current Crypto market, there are only two and a half proven business models that generate large-scale on-chain fees — low cost payments (Tron), high-frequency speculation (Solana/Base), and the asset settlement layer (Ethereum), which is being continuously divided by L2.

In addition to this, those “enterprise-level applications”, “supply chain traceability”, and “Web3 social networking”, which were once highly anticipated, have yet to show large-scale payment requirements in the face of cold on-chain fee data, at least at this stage.

3. The difficult situation of VC formation: why “debut is the pinnacle”?

The data also revealed another deep crisis: the new L1/L2 narrative model, driven by huge venture capital (VC) funding, is undergoing a brutal monetization test.

We have seen new public chains such as Sui (about $12,000 per day), Sei (average of about $320 per day), and Starknet (average of about 10,000 US dollars per day) that have gone online and raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and their on-chain fee revenue is seriously inverted with their full circulation valuation (FDV) of billions or even tens of billions of dollars.

The standard script for the past few years is: VC investment -> team building technology highlights -> attracting Airdrop Farmers (Airdrop Farmers) to steal data -> token listing and exchange wealth -> retail takeover narratives -> withdrawal of the Jermao Party -> cliff-style decline in on-chain activity data.

This is why many of the new chains had amazing TPS and hundreds of thousands of daily activity when launched, but quickly became “ghost towns” a few months later. Because those users are mercenaries, not residents. When airdrop expectations are fulfilled, and when incentives and subsidies stop, real organic demand (organic demand) is revealed — tens of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of daily fee revenue simply cannot support the dream of a valuation of 10 billion dollars.

We are facing severe “blockchain space inflation.” The industry has built too many chains, too many L2, and too many data availability (DA) layers, yet innovation at the application layer is extremely scarce. It's like at the beginning of the popularity of broadband networks, where tens of thousands of fibers were feverishly installed, and yet Netflix, YouTube, or any killer app that had to consume that bandwidth was not born.

4. Investors' Awakening: From “Listening to Stories” to “Checking Ledgers”

The crypto market's valuation logic has long been based on a “market dream rate.” The bigger the story, the richer the imagination, the higher the market value.

But 2024-2025 is turning into a watershed. As macro-liquidity tightens and institutional investors demand more substantial returns, the market is being forced to return to rationality.

For investors, the logic must shift:

1. Be wary of “zombie coins”: If the market value of a project is as high as several billion dollars, but the average daily on-chain fee is only a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, this extreme “bad balance” is often the starting point of a long-term decline. Its only support — community faith — will eventually run out.

2. Focus on “positive cash flow” capabilities: Look for ecosystems where users are willing to continue to pay for their services even without token incentives. Tron's stablecoin transfer fees, Base and Solana's transaction fees are all direct expressions of real demand.

3. Acknowledging that “channels and ecology are king”: Base's success has proven that pure technical advantage can hardly be a moat. Giants (such as Coinbase) that bring in a large number of users, or native communities that can nurture a fanatical culture, are the most valuable assets at this stage. Simple technical public chains, if unable to solve the problem of “who will use it and why,” will eventually only become an Algorand-style academic display.

4. See through VC gaming: Stop paying for false prosperity driven by subsidies and airdrops.

Facing the harsh reality of an average daily income of $17, instead of paying for grand narratives and empty “digital ghost towns,” it's better to tighten up your wallet and switch to a few ecosystems that generate real cash flows and have active paying users.

This is not a denial of the long-term value of all technological exploration; it is a necessary liquidation of the current malformed valuation system. Only when the market learns to pay for “real value generated” rather than overdraft for “future promised stories” can the industry usher in a truly healthy dawn.

Key notes and evaluation framework

The core of this article is to measure the “ability to capture immediate value” of each public chain using a unified and open scale called “on-chain fees.” As you read and cite the conclusions of this article, be sure to understand the following key background and limitations:

1. General background note

• Differences in development stages: Some public chains may have advanced technology but are in the early stages, and the user base has not yet formed a large-scale effect. The data in this article reflects the “current state”, not the “ultimate potential.”

• The impact of the fee model: Some public chains are designed to pursue ultra-low processing fees (gas fees), and their native token prices are low. This makes the “total processing fee revenue” in US dollars appear insignificant, even if the number of on-chain transactions is impressive. This suggests that the evaluation of such chains should be judged based on indicators such as number of transactions and number of active addresses, but the upper limit of their economic throughput in US dollars is still an objective fact.

2. Evaluation instructions for specific types of chains

For a more fair discussion, we provide the following evaluation ideas for specific types of projects:

We've always believed that in a world where profits are highly concentrated, the fate of a long-tail project is almost decided unless it finds a unique application scenario (such as a game or a specific AppChain). Only platforms that can generate cash flow through real and continuous user demand have the potential to survive and outperform the market in the long term.

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