In under two weeks, an AI found a bug that exposes the PHP software running 70% of websites. Hackers used AI agents to break into 100+ companies. GitLab, LiteLLM, and even a major certificate authority all got hit.
Governments are pulling sites offline. Everyone’s scrambling to change their passwords.
To the normies: welcome to crypto. We’ve been living like this for years.
Here’s what we got today:
Holder revenue is king. Lessons from last 2 months’ DeFi token market
Trueo x DefiLlama partnership. You can now bet on onchain metrics.
Around the web. Alpenglow is live on Solana mainnet, Network School acquired Farcaster, Privacy Pools v2, and more.
Here’s your Edge 🗡️!
Analysis
These DeFi Tokens Crushed Bitcoin While It Went Sideways
BTC has gone sideways for two months, but a lot of DeFi tokens didn’t get the memo.
TL;DR
DeFi tokens whose payouts to holders grew more than 25% returned a median +18.3%. Everyone else got +6.9%.
Cheap didn’t win. Starting multiples had basically zero link to returns.
Next time BTC goes flat, look for payouts about to grow, then check unlocks and FDV.
How flat has BTC been?
After a 21% jump in August, BTC has been stuck in a range. Since Aug 22, every daily close has landed between $75.6k and $86.6k.
Start to finish, BTC is up 5.6%. ETH is down 2.7%.
14 of the 19 biggest DeFi tokens that pay holders beat BTC. Raydium is up 178%.
The median one returned +12.9%, more than double BTC.
Why track holder revenue?
Because plain revenue can fool you. A protocol can print money and pass none of it to you. For all you know, the team is buying yachts with it.
So I only counted holder revenue, meaning buybacks, burns, and payouts that land with token holders. That’s DeFiLlama’s definition btw.
To make the cut, a token had to be:
Core DeFi only (DEXs, perps, lending, CDPs, liquid staking, yield, aggregators). No chains, oracles, or launchpads (yes, including Pons & pump.fun).
Above $100M market cap on Aug 22.
Paying holders at some point in the past year.
If it passed, all its holder revenue counts, including Raydium’s launchpad buybacks and Hyperliquid’s gas burn.
I compared Aug 22 to Oct 20 against the 59 days before it, using CoinGecko prices.
That left 19 tokens.
The Scorecard
“Mcap / holder revenue” is market cap over a year of holder revenue at today’s pace. Lower means you pay less for each dollar that goes to holders.
So what won?
Split the table in two and the payout growers win, +18.3% to +6.9%.
The top three all had a clear reason their payouts were growing.
Raydium. StonkFun, the tokenized-stock launchpad, moved onto LaunchLab on Sep 5. RAY buybacks went from $0.36M in July to $3.94M in September, an 11x jump.
Uniswap. The fee switch was already live, and Robinhood season brought the volume. RH Chain drove about half of September’s protocol revenue.
Aero. After the Aerodrome and Velodrome merger, voters get trading fees plus payments from projects buying liquidity. That hit $14.9M in September, beating the $10.5M of AERO paid to LPs.
It works in reverse too. edgeX’s payouts fell 15%, and its price fell 22%, the worst on the board.
Does cheap mean good?
Not here, and this one surprised me.
Aero was the cheapest at 8.7x and ran 77%. edgeX was the second cheapest at 15x and finished dead last.
A low multiple on its own told you nothing about where a token was gonna go.
Who broke the pattern?
Hyperliquid. Payouts grew 79%, but price rose only 6%. On FDV it trades at about 85x, and about $0.8B of HYPE unlocks every month against about $75M of buybacks. That’s a lot of HYPE to absorb (pun fully intended).
Sky. An Aug 13 governance vote sent 55% of each payout cycle to buybacks and 45% to stakers. Payouts nearly quadrupled. Price rose only 11%.
Aave. Buybacks have been paused since April after the rsETH exploit, so holders got $0 the whole range. Aave still rose 24%.
My read is that the market prices where payouts are headed, along with where they are today. I’m not 100% sure that’s the whole story though.
What would I check next time BTC goes sideways?
Treat each name as a research lead that has to pass three checks.
Payouts are already growing.
A catalyst is coming, like a new launchpad, a fee switch with fresh volume, or a merger.
Unlocks and FDV are checked, because Hyperliquid shows how hard they can drag on price.
Fine print
19 tokens over 59 days isn’t conclusive. One more month of data could reshuffle the middle of the table.
I’m measuring payouts and price over the same two months. So this shows what to look for, but it doesn’t prove you could’ve picked the winners on Aug 22.
Multiples use circulating market cap, so tokens with big locked supplies look cheaper than they are. Hyperliquid is 19.6x on circulating ($18.1B) and about 85x on FDV ($77.8B).
Holder revenue comes from DeFiLlama, and their data might not be perfect. It’s still the best in the industry, so I’m not too worried.
Some protocols pay in batches. Lido’s buybacks go out in DAO-approved rounds, so a quiet month doesn’t mean they stopped.
Meteora is left out of the +18.3% vs +6.9% split. Its payouts are new, so there’s nothing to compare against.
THORChain’s holder revenue is the slice of swap fees burned as RUNE. That slice dropped from 5% to 1% on Sep 12, so its price move isn’t about payouts.
More numbers behind the exceptions. Hyperliquid sent $146.9M to holders in 59 days, 59% of the group’s total. Roughly 9.9M HYPE unlocks for the team each month. Sky’s multiple fell from 98x to 28.5x.
Products
Bet on onchain metrics via DefiLlama?
Defillama.com/predictions
Will Morpho get exploited this month?
That used to be a question you worried about. Now it’s a market you can trade and hedge.
DefiLlama just partnered with Trueo to launch prediction markets that settle on DefiLlama data. Revenue, hacks, TVL. The numbers we stare at every day are now tradable.
What did they actually launch?
80/20 on Trueo: It’s a permissionless onchain prediction market. DefiLlama is the data source everyone in DeFi already trusts. Put them together, and you get markets that settle on the dashboards you already check.
Trueo markets are now visible directly on the DefiLlama website. But for the actual execution of the trade, you still have to go to Trueo’s website. If they provide the whole experience inside DeFiLlama, it’ll have more traction.
This enables many types of markets.
Revenue markets. No more waiting for a token to (maybe) reprice on a good month. You can just bet that the token will cross the revenue level.
Exploit markets. You can trade the odds of total DeFi hacks, and of exploits on specific protocols. Right now there are markets on whether Aave and Morpho get exploited this month.
Other onchain metrics. Robinhood Chain RWA market cap. Robinhood Chain DEX volume. Whether Solana or Base ends the week with higher TVL.
That’s a lot of new things to bet on. And this is only the first batch.
Some of it, like exploit markets, can be really useful. Say you’ve got money parked in a lending protocol and you’re nervous about an exploit. If the market prices that exploit at 1%, you can put 1% of your deposit on “yes” and you’re fully hedged.
How did this happen so fast?
Trueo’s permissionless market creation.
On Trueo, anyone can create a market. You set the question, the data source, and the resolution rules, and they get locked onchain when the market launches.
That’s what made the deal easy. DefiLlama didn’t have to build a prediction market. Trueo didn’t have to build a data brand. Each side brought the half the other was missing:
DefiLlama gets a new product on top of data it already publishes, without the regulatory and engineering headache of running a betting venue.
Trueo gets distribution. Its markets now sit in front of DefiLlama’s audience, which is basically everyone who cares about DeFi metrics.
Win-win. And the whole thing runs on rails anyone can use.
And the market really liked it. $TRUE is up >2x since the announcement.
For context, TRUE is still tiny. DefiLlama lists its market cap at about $7.6M. That’s small enough that one good distribution deal moves the needle.
Any platform with an audience and trusted data could plug Trueo markets in the same way. Think block explorers, analytics dashboards, research shops. So, Trueo can tap into a lot of distribution channels.
The major roadblock right now is liquidity. Even at the market leaders, Polymarket and Kalshi, liquidity piles into a handful of top markets. Elections, sports, big macro calls. The long tail of markets sits mostly empty.
The idea is great. Now, I’m watching if this can actually attract liquidity and volume.
🚀 DeFi Catalysts
Solana switched on Alpenglow on mainnet, its biggest consensus overhaul yet. The target is ~150ms finality, down from 12.8 seconds.
Network School is acquiring Farcaster from Neynar, less than 9 months after Neynar bought it. Farcaster becomes the “Network State Protocol.”
Papertrade says PAPER will be non-transferable for some time. Outside perp markets on PAPER would let attackers short the token while trying to drain the bankroll.
Pump.fun has partnered with PreStocks. You can trade OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, Neuralink, Kalshi, Polymarket, and more.
Vitalik is pushing for “EIP-8288”. Heavy cryptography gets computed and STARK-proved off-chain, so Ethereum only sees the result and never needs to add another precompile.
LONG turned on community basket management for AINX. AI holders now vote on what goes into the basket each 7-day cycle and earn fees from AINX trading
Kintsu opened a private beta on Canton Network for lending and staking. Invited testers can supply USDC, borrow against Canton Coin, and stake CC.
🧰 The Toolkit
Privacy Pools launched their v2 on seven chains. It has many features, from payment requests to earning yield. And it’s compliant.
Ledger launched Agent Intent. AI agents watch the market and propose portfolio moves, and nothing executes until you approve it on your Ledger.
Binance launched AI Pro for traders. It turns plain-English instructions into automated trading workflows.
📰 Industry News
Russia will ban direct P2P crypto trades from July 1, 2027. Separate rules already block transfers to self-custody wallets.
Matter Labs launched Prividium Commander, a control panel that lets banks run tokenized deposits under their own rules. Every transaction gets checked and logged for auditors.
JPMorgan brought its JPM Coin deposit token to Ethereum for institutional clients. It launched on Base last year, and access stays limited to approved institutions.
Ripple Prime added RWA perpetual swaps tied to Trade.xyz markets on Hyperliquid. Institutions get 100+ markets in equities, FX and commodities, 24/7, without touching Hyperliquid directly.
Nine companies, including CoreWeave, Broadcom, Verizon and UnitedHealth, objected to tokenized versions of their shares trading on OKX-ICE’s venue. Nasdaq is opting out too.
📉 Down Bad
Nillion L2 is shutting down, but the project isn’t. Move your NIL to L1 via the official bridge.
Ledger confirmed a criminal group bought genuine devices, fitted hidden implants that capture seed phrases, and sold them back through resellers.
Sophon is shutting down its zkSync chain. Withdraw by November 25, because anything left after that may be gone for good.
Echo Protocol is winding down after two years. Lending, staking and Strategy deposits are closed, and borrowers must repay by November 14 or face liquidation.
DISCLAIMER: I’m NOT a financial advisor. This content is for education and information purposes only. Crypto and DeFi are risky and speculative. Please do your research before investing.
Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help you:
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