The Ethereum mainnet’s V1 version was the foundation, but it was the V2 version launched in May 2020 that truly made Uniswap famous. Raydium, on the other hand, went live on Solana in 2021.

The reason for recommending attention to these two different projects in the DEX space is that they belong to the two largest ecosystems in Web3 today: the EVM ecosystem built around Ethereum, the king of public chains, and the rapidly growing Solana ecosystem. Both projects have their own advantages and issues. We will now analyze these two projects separately.

2.1 Uniswap

2.1.1 Business situation

Since the launch of Uniswap V2, it has consistently held the largest share of trading volume on the Ethereum mainnet and most EVM chains. In terms of business, we focus primarily on two metrics: trading volume and fees.

The following chart shows the monthly trading volume share of DEXs since the launch of Uniswap V2 (excluding DEX trading volume on non-EVM chains):

Data source: Tokenterminal

Since the launch of the V2 version in May 2020, Uniswap’s market share has fluctuated from a peak of 78.4% in August 2020, to a low of 36.8% during the DEX battle peak in November 2021, and has now rebounded to 56.7%. This indicates that, despite facing intense competition, Uniswap has managed to solidify its position.

Data source: Tokenterminal

Uniswap’s market share in trading fees has similarly shown this trend, reaching a low of 36.7% in November 2021 and then steadily rising to 57.6% currently.

What is particularly notable is that, aside from a few months of token incentives for liquidity in 2020 (Ethereum mainnet) and late 2022 (Optimism mainnet), Uniswap has not provided liquidity incentives for the rest of the time. In contrast, most DEXs have continued to offer liquidity incentives up to the present.

The following chart shows the monthly incentive amounts for major DEXs. It is evident that Sushiswap, Curve, PancakeSwap, and currently Aerodrome on Base, were once among the top in terms of incentive amounts. However, none of them have achieved a higher market share than Uniswap.

Data source: Tokenterminal

However, Uniswap is often criticized for not having a value capture mechanism for its tokens despite not having token incentives. The protocol has not yet activated a fee switch.

In late February 2024, Erin Koen, the Uniswap developer and governance lead, proposed an upgrade to the Uniswap protocol to introduce a fee mechanism that would reward UNI token holders who have authorized and staked their tokens. This proposal sparked considerable community discussion and was initially set for a formal vote on May 31, but the vote has been delayed. Nevertheless, this marks the first step toward enabling protocol fees and empowering UNI tokens, with the upgraded contract already developed and audited. In the foreseeable future, Uniswap will generate protocol revenue.

Additionally, Uniswap Labs began charging users who trade using the Uniswap official frontend and Uniswap Wallet in October 2023. The fee is 0.15% of the transaction amount, covering ETH, USDC, WETH, USDT, DAI, WBTC, agEUR, GUSD, LUSD, EUROC, and XSGD, though stablecoin trades and ETH/WETH swaps are exempt from this fee.

The revenue from just the Uniswap frontend has already positioned Uniswap Labs as one of the highest-grossing teams in the Web3 space. When the protocol fees are fully implemented, based on the annualized fee of approximately $1.13 billion for the first half of 2024 and assuming a 10% fee rate, the annual protocol revenue could be around $113 million.

With the upcoming launch of Uniswap X and V4 in the latter half of this year, Uniswap is expected to further increase its trading volume and market share in trading fees.

2.1.2 Moat

Uniswap’s competitive moat primarily comes from the following three aspects:

1. User habits: When Uniswap first introduced frontend fees last year, many thought it was a poor decision and expected users to quickly shift their trading activities to aggregators like 1inch to avoid additional fees. However, since the implementation of frontend fees, revenue from the frontend has consistently increased, with its growth rate even surpassing that of the overall protocol fees.

Data source: Tokenterminal

This data strongly illustrates the power of Uniswap’s user habits, as a large number of users are not deterred by the 0.15% trading fee and choose to maintain their trading habits.

1. Bilateral network effects: As a trading platform, Uniswap is a typical two-sided market. One angle of understanding its “bilateral” market is that it consists of buyers (traders) and market makers (LPs). The more active a market is on one side, the more LPs are inclined to provide liquidity there, reinforcing each other. Another angle is that one side of the market includes traders, while the other side consists of projects deploying initial liquidity for their tokens. To make their tokens more accessible and tradable, projects often prefer to deploy initial liquidity on well-known and widely used DEXs like Uniswap rather than on less popular ones. This behavior further reinforces users’ habitual trading behavior—new tokens are prioritized for trading on Uniswap—creating a mutual reinforcement between the “projects” and “trading users.”

2. Multi-chain deployment: Similar to Aave, Uniswap is very active in expanding across multiple chains. It is present on most major EVM chains with significant trading volumes, and its trading volume is generally among the top in the DEX rankings on these chains.

Subsequently, with the launch of Uniswap X and its support for multi-chain trading, Uniswap’s comprehensive advantage in multi-chain liquidity will be further amplified.

2.1.3 Valuation

By evaluating Uniswap’s market capitalization relative to its annualized fees, known as the PF ratio, we find that the current valuation of UNI tokens is at a historically high percentile. This may be due to the anticipated fee switch upgrade, which could already be reflected in the market capitalization.

Data source: Tokenterminal

In terms of market capitalization, Uniswap currently has a circulating market cap of nearly $6 billion and a fully diluted market cap of up to $9.3 billion, which are also relatively high.

2.1.4 Risks and challenges

Policy Risk: In April this year, Uniswap received a Wells Notice from the SEC, indicating that the SEC will take enforcement action against Uniswap. While the FIT21 Act is gradually progressing and may provide a clearer and more predictable regulatory framework for DeFi projects like Uniswap in the future, the act’s approval and implementation will take time. In the meantime, the SEC’s lawsuit is likely to put pressure on the project’s operations and token price.

Ecological Position: DEXs form the foundational layer of liquidity, with trading aggregators like 1inch, Cowswap, and Paraswap previously serving as the upstream layer. These aggregators provide users with price comparisons across the entire chain and find the optimal trading paths, which somewhat limits the ability of downstream DEXs to charge and price user transactions. As the industry evolves, wallets with built-in trading functions are becoming a more upstream infrastructure. With the introduction of intent-based models, DEXs, as sources of underlying liquidity, may become a layer completely invisible to users, potentially further eroding the habit of directly using Uniswap and shifting to a “comparison mode.” Recognizing this, Uniswap is actively moving upstream in the ecosystem, such as by promoting the Uniswap Wallet and launching Uniswap X to enter the aggregation layer, aiming to improve its ecological position.

2.2 Raydium

2.2.1 Business situation

We will also focus on analyzing Raydium’s trading volume and fees. A notable advantage of Raydium over Uniswap is that it began charging protocol fees early on, resulting in strong protocol cash flow. Therefore, we also prioritize examining Raydium’s protocol revenue.

First, let’s look at Raydium’s trading volume. Thanks to the recent prosperity of the Solana ecosystem, Raydium’s trading volume began to soar starting in October of last year. By March, its trading volume had reached $47.5 billion, about 52.7% of Uniswap’s trading volume for that month.

Data source: flipside

In terms of market share, Raydium’s trading volume on the Solana chain has been rising since September of last year. It now accounts for 62.8% of the Solana ecosystem’s trading volume, surpassing Uniswap’s dominance within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Data source: Dune

Raydium’s market share has surged from less than 10% during its low period to over 60% currently, largely due to the ongoing Meme craze in this bull market cycle. Raydium employs a dual liquidity pool approach, using both standard AMM and CPMM models. The standard AMM is similar to Uni V2, with evenly distributed liquidity suitable for high-volatility assets. The CPMM model, akin to Uni V3’s concentrated liquidity pools, allows liquidity providers to customize liquidity ranges, offering greater flexibility but also increased complexity.

In contrast, Raydium’s competitor, Orca, has fully embraced the Uni V3-type concentrated liquidity pool model. For Meme projects that require large-scale and frequent liquidity provisioning, Raydium’s standard AMM model is more suitable, making it the preferred liquidity venue for Meme tokens.

Solana, as the largest Meme incubator in this bull market, has seen hundreds to thousands of new Memes emerging daily since November. This Meme trend is a core driver of the current Solana ecosystem’s prosperity and has acted as a catalyst for Raydium’s business growth.

Data source: Dune

From the chart, it can be seen that in December 2023, Raydium added 19,664 new tokens in a week, while Orca had only 89 in the same period. Although Orca’s concentrated liquidity mechanism theoretically allows for “full-range” liquidity provisioning to achieve similar effects to traditional AMMs, it is still less straightforward compared to Raydium’s standard pools.

Raydium’s trading volume data supports this observation, with 94.3% of the trading volume coming from its standard pools, most of which is contributed by Meme tokens.

Additionally, as a two-sided market like Uniswap, Raydium serves both project teams and users. The greater the number of retail investors on Raydium, the more Meme projects are inclined to deploy initial liquidity there. This, in turn, attracts users and tools (such as various Telegram bots) to choose Raydium for trading. This self-reinforcing cycle has further widened the gap between Raydium and Orca.

In terms of trading fees, Raydium generated approximately $300 million in fees during the first half of 2024, which is 9.3 times the total trading fees for Raydium in 2023.

Data source: flipside

Raydium’s standard AMM pool charges a fee of 0.25% of the trading volume, with 0.22% going to liquidity providers (LPs) and 0.03% allocated for buying back the protocol token, Ray.

For CPMM pools, the fee rate can be set freely at 1%, 0.25%, 0.05%, or 0.01%. LPs receive 84% of the trading fees, while 16% is split between buying back Ray (12%) and depositing into the treasury (4%).

Data source: flipside

In the first half of 2024, Raydium used approximately $20.98 million of its protocol revenue for buying back Ray, which is 10.5 times the total amount used for Ray buybacks in 2023.

In addition to fee income, Raydium also charges for creating new pools. Currently, creating an AMM standard pool costs 0.4 SOL, while creating a CPMM pool costs 0.15 SOL. On average, Raydium receives 775 SOL daily from pool creation fees (approximately $108,000 at a rate of 6.30 SOL). These fees are not allocated to the treasury or used for Ray buybacks but are instead directed towards the protocol’s development and maintenance, effectively serving as team revenue.

Data source: flipside

Like most DEXs, Raydium still provides incentives for DEX liquidity. Although continuous data on the incentive amounts is not readily available, we can estimate the current incentive value of the liquidity pools from the official liquidity interface.

According to the current liquidity incentives on Raydium, approximately $48,000 worth of incentives are spent weekly, primarily in Ray tokens. This amount is significantly lower than the protocol’s weekly revenue of nearly $800,000 (excluding pool creation fees), indicating that the protocol is operating with positive cash flow.

2.2.2 Moat

Raydium is currently the largest DEX by market trading volume on Solana. Compared to its competitors, its main advantage lies in the current bilateral network effects. Similar to Uniswap, Raydium benefits from the mutual reinforcement between traders and LPs, as well as between project teams and trading users. This network effect is particularly pronounced in the Meme asset category.

2.2.3 Valuation

Due to the lack of historical data prior to 2023, I am comparing Raydium’s valuation data from the first half of this year with its valuation data from 2023.

Despite the surge in trading volume this year and an increase in the price of Ray, the valuation ratios have significantly decreased compared to last year. The PF ratio of Raydium, compared to Uniswap and other DEXs, remains relatively low.

2.2.4 Risks and challenges

Despite Raydium’s strong performance in trading volume and revenue over the past six months, its future development faces several uncertainties and challenges:

Ecological Position: Like Uniswap, Raydium faces issues with its ecological position. In the Solana ecosystem, aggregators such as Jupiter have greater influence, with trading volumes far exceeding Raydium’s (Jupiter’s total trading volume in June was $28.2 billion, compared to Raydium’s $16.8 billion). Additionally, platforms like Pump.fun are increasingly replacing Raydium as the launchpad for Meme projects, with more Memes starting on Pump.fun rather than Raydium, despite their current cooperation. If this trend continues, and if Pump.fun or Jupiter build their own DEXs or shift to competitors, it could significantly impact Raydium.

Market Trend Changes: Before the current Meme craze on Solana, Orca’s trading volume market share was seven times that of Raydium. Raydium regained market share with its standard pools, which are more favorable to Meme projects. However, the sustainability of Solana’s Meme trend is uncertain, and changes in market trends could challenge Raydium’s market share if the types of traded assets shift.

Token Emission: Raydium’s token circulation ratio is currently 47.2%, which is relatively low compared to many DeFi projects. Future sell-off pressure from unlocked tokens could put downward pressure on the price. However, considering the project’s strong cash flow, the team might choose to burn unvested tokens to alleviate investor concerns.

High Centralization: Raydium has yet to implement a governance program based on the Ray token, with project development currently fully controlled by the project team. This centralization could prevent profits that should belong to token holders from being realized, such as the distribution of Ray tokens bought back by the protocol, which remains undecided.

3. Staking：Lido

Lido is a leading liquid staking protocol on the Ethereum network. The Beacon Chain’s launch at the end of 2020 marked the official beginning of Ethereum’s transition from PoW to PoS. At that time, staked ETH lost its liquidity due to the absence of a withdrawal feature. In fact, the Shapella upgrade, which allowed withdrawals of Beacon Chain staked assets, only occurred in April 2023. This means that users who staked ETH early on were without liquidity for up to two and a half years.

Lido pioneered the liquid staking sector. Users who deposit ETH into Lido receive stETH tokens issued by Lido. Lido incentivized a deep stETH-ETH LP on Curve, thus offering users a stable service of “earning rewards from ETH staking while maintaining liquidity for withdrawal at any time.” This innovation led to rapid growth and established Lido as a leader in Ethereum staking.

In terms of its business model, Lido captures 10% of its staking revenue, with 5% allocated to staking service providers and the remaining 5% managed by the DAO.

3.1 Business situation

Lido currently focuses primarily on ETH liquid staking services. Previously, Lido was the largest provider of liquid staking services on the Terra network and the second largest on Solana. It also actively expanded into other chains such as Cosmos and Polygon. However, Lido wisely underwent a strategic contraction, shifting its focus entirely to ETH staking services. Today, Lido is the leader in the ETH staking market and holds the highest TVL among DeFi protocols.

source:DeFiLlama

With deep stETH-ETH liquidity created by substantial $LDO incentives and investment support from institutions like Paradigm and Dragonfly in April 2021, Lido surpassed its main competitors—centralized exchanges (Kraken and Coinbase)—by the end of 2021, establishing itself as the leader in the Ethereum staking sector.

Lido spent a total of approximately $280 million in 2021-2022 to incentivize stETH-ETH liquidity Source:Dune

However, discussions soon arose about whether Lido’s dominance could impact Ethereum’s decentralization. The Ethereum Foundation also considered whether it was necessary to limit a single entity’s staking share to no more than 33.3%. After reaching a peak market share of 32.6% in May 2022, Lido’s market share has since fluctuated between 28% and 32%.

Historical situation of ETH staking market share (the light blue block at the bottom is Lido) SourceDune

3.2 Moat

Lido’s moat primarily consists of the following two points:

1. Long-Term Market Leadership: Lido’s stable market position makes it the preferred choice for large investors and institutions entering ETH staking. Prominent figures such as Sun Yuchen, Mantle before issuing its own LST, and many large whales are all Lido users.
2. Network Effects of stETH: stETH has been widely supported by major DeFi protocols since 2022. New DeFi projects that emerge often seek to attract stETH, as seen with the popularity of LSTFi projects, Pendle, and various LRT projects in 2023. stETH’s position as a foundational yield asset in the Ethereum network remains solid.

3.3 Valuation level

Despite a slight decline in Lido’s market share, its staking volume continues to rise with the increase in Ethereum’s overall staking ratio. In terms of valuation metrics, Lido’s PS and PF have recently reached historical lows.

source:Token Terminal

With the successful rollout of the Shapella upgrade, Lido’s market position remains solid. The profit metrics, reflecting the “revenue-token incentives” indicator, have also performed well, with a total profit of $36.35 million accumulated over the past year.

source:Token Terminal

This has also sparked community expectations for adjustments to the $LDO economic model. However, Lido’s actual leader, Hasu, has repeatedly stated that, compared to Lido’s current expenditures, the income from the community treasury cannot sustain all of Lido DAO’s expenses in the long term, making discussions about revenue distribution premature.

3.4 Risks and Challenges

Lido faces the following risks and challenges:

1. Competition from new entrants: Since the launch of Eigenlayer, Lido’s market share has been on the decline. New projects with substantial token marketing budgets can become significant competitors to Lido, which, despite its leading position, is approaching full token circulation.
2. Long-term concerns from the Ethereum community: There are ongoing concerns from within the Ethereum community, including some members of the Ethereum Foundation, about Lido’s dominance in the staking market. Vitalik Buterin has previously discussed this issue and @vbuterin/staking_2023_10">outlined various solutions, though he did not show a clear preference for any particular solution. (For further analysis on this topic, readers can refer to an article published by Mint Ventures in November last year.)
3. Regulatory risks: On June 28, 2024, the SEC explicitly defined LSTs as securities in its charges against ConsenSys. The SEC alleged that users’ actions of minting and purchasing stETH constitute “Lido’s issuance and sale of unregistered securities,” and ConsenSys is implicated for providing staking services to Lido as “issuance and sale of unregistered securities.”

4. Perpetual contract exchange: GMX

GMX is a perpetual contract trading platform that launched on Arbitrum in September 2021 and on Avalanche in January 2022. It operates as a bilateral market: one side consists of traders who can engage in leverage trading up to 100x, while the other side consists of liquidity providers who offer their assets to facilitate trades and act as counter-parties to the traders.

In terms of its business model, GMX generates revenue from trading fees ranging from 0.05% to 0.1%, as well as from funding and borrowing fees. GMX distributes 70% of its total revenue to liquidity providers, while the remaining 30% is allocated to GMX stakers.

4.1Business situation

In the perpetual contract trading platform sector, the presence of new projects with airdrop retroactive rewards (such as Aevo, Hyperliquid, Synfutures, Drift, etc.) and existing projects that commonly offer similar trading incentives (such as dYdX, Vertex, RabbitX) means that trading volume data can be less representative. Instead, we will use TVL, PS, and profit metrics to compare GMX with its competitors.

In terms of TVL, GMX currently leads the field. However, well-established derivatives protocols like dYdX, Jupiter Perp with significant Solana traffic, and the upcoming Hyperliquid also have TVLs in a similar range.

Data Sources:DeFiLlama

From the PS metric, among projects with issued tokens that focus primarily on perpetual contract trading and have a daily trading volume exceeding $30 million, GMX has a relatively low PS ratio, only higher than Vertex, which still offers substantial trading mining incentives.

From a profit perspective, GMX earned $6.5 million over the past year, which is lower than DYDX, GNS, and SNX. However, it’s worth noting that this is largely due to GMX releasing all 12 million ARB tokens (approximately $18 million at the average price during that period) received from Arbitrum’s STIP event from November last year to March this year, which significantly reduced profits. The slope of GMX’s profit accumulation indicates its strong profit-generating capability.

4.2 Moat

Compared to the other DeFi projects mentioned, GMX’s moat is relatively weaker. The frequent emergence of new derivative exchanges in recent years has significantly impacted GMX’s trading volume, and the sector remains quite crowded. GMX’s main advantages include:

1. Arbitrum’s strong support. As a native project on the Arbitrum network, GMX contributed nearly half of Arbitrum’s TVL at its peak. During this time, almost all new DeFi projects on Arbitrum were developed with GMX’s GLP token. This not only provided GMX with exposure from Arbitrum but also resulted in significant rewards from ARB incentive programs (8 million ARB initially and 12 million ARB from STIP), enriching GMX’s treasury and providing valuable marketing resources for its fully circulating GMX tokens.
2. Positive image from long-term industry leadership. GMX led the “real yield DeFi” narrative from the second half of 2022 to the first half of 2023, standing out in a market that was otherwise bearish. This helped GMX build a strong brand image and attract a loyal user base during that period.
3. Scale effects. GMX benefits from scale effects typical of trading platforms. Only with sufficient liquidity provider (LP) scale can a platform handle larger trade orders and higher open contract volumes. Greater trading volumes, in turn, provide higher returns to LPs. As a leading derivative trading platform on-chain, GMX has benefited from these scale effects. For example, renowned trader Andrew Kang has maintained multi-million dollar positions on GMX, making it almost his only choice for such large positions at the time.

4.3 Valuation level

GMX is currently fully circulating. As noted in the previous comparison, GMX is the lowest valued mainstream derivatives exchange.

When compared to historical data, GMX’s revenue situation has been relatively stable, with its PS ratio historically positioned on the lower side of the spectrum.

4.4 Risks and Challenges

1. GMX faces strong competition from both established and emerging players. Its rivals include well-known DeFi protocols like Synthetix and dYdX, as well as newer entrants such as AEVO and Hyperliquid, which have garnered significant trading volume and exposure in the past year. Jupiter Perp, leveraging Solana’s vast traffic, uses a mechanism almost identical to GMX’s, achieving a TVL close to GMX and surpassing its trading volume. GMX is preparing to expand its V2 version to Solana, but overall, the sector remains highly competitive without a clear dominant player. Additionally, common trading mining incentives lower user switching costs, leading to generally low user loyalty.
2. GMX relies on oracle prices for trade execution and liquidation, making it vulnerable to oracle attacks. In September 2022, GMX on Avalanche suffered a $560,000 loss due to an oracle attack on AVAX. However, for most assets GMX allows trading, the cost of attacking (manipulating the corresponding CEX token price) is significantly higher than the potential gain. GMX’s V2 version has introduced isolation pools and trading slippage measures to mitigate this risk.

5. Other Defi projects worthy of attention

In addition to the DeFi projects mentioned earlier, we also investigated other notable projects such as the established stablecoin MakerDAO, the emerging player Ethena, and the leading oracle Chainlink. However, due to space constraints, not all projects could be covered in this article. Moreover, each of these projects faces significant issues:

MakerDAO remains a leading decentralized stablecoin issuer with a substantial number of “natural holders” of DAI, similar to USDC and USDT holders. Despite this, the size of its stablecoin has stagnated, with its market cap being about half of its previous peak. The heavy reliance on off-chain USD assets for collateral is also gradually undermining the decentralization credibility of its token.

Ethena presents a stark contrast with its stablecoin USDe, which has rapidly grown from zero to $3.6 billion in just six months. However, Ethena’s business model—a public fund focusing on perpetual contract arbitrage—has apparent limitations. The rapid expansion of its stablecoin is heavily dependent on secondary market users willing to pay high prices for its token ENA, which provides substantial returns to USDe. This somewhat Ponzi-like design could easily lead to a negative spiral in market downturns. The key to Ethena’s business pivot is whether USDe can evolve into a truly decentralized stablecoin with many “natural holders,” transitioning from a public arbitrage fund to a stablecoin operator. Given that most of USDe’s underlying assets are stored in centralized exchange arbitrage positions, USDe struggles with both “decentralization and censorship resistance” and “strong institutional endorsement,” making it difficult to replace DAI or USDT.

Chainlink is preparing for a potential significant shift driven by major financial institutions like BlackRock embracing Web3, particularly the Real World Asset (RWA) narrative. Besides pushing for BTC and ETH ETFs, BlackRock’s notable move this year is launching a US Treasury fund on Ethereum, with its fund size exceeding $380 million within six weeks. Future experiments in on-chain financial products by traditional financial giants will inevitably face challenges such as tokenizing off-chain assets and ensuring on-chain and off-chain interoperability. Chainlink is at the forefront of this exploration, having completed a pilot project for “Smart NAV” with the DTCC and several major U.S. financial institutions. This project aims to establish a standardized process using Chainlink’s interoperability protocol, CCIP, to aggregate and distribute fund asset NAV data on private or public blockchains. Additionally, Ark Invest and 21Shares announced in February their integration of Chainlink’s proof of reserves platform to validate holdings data. Despite these advancements, Chainlink still faces the challenge of separating its business value from its token, with LINK lacking clear value capture and rigid use cases, raising concerns about whether token holders can benefit from the company’s business growth.

Summary

Like the development of many revolutionary products, DeFi also followed a similar trajectory. It experienced the narrative hype of its inception in 2020, a rapid asset bubble in 2021, and the disillusionment phase following the bubble burst in the 2022 bear market. Currently, as product-market fit (PMF) is fully validated, DeFi is emerging from the narrative disillusionment phase, building its intrinsic value through actual business data.

The author believes that as one of the few crypto fields with a mature business model and a growing market space, Defi still has long-term attention and investment value.

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