L1 Value Capture Shrinks Significantly, ETH, SOL, HYPE Struggle to Return to Price Peaks
This analysis examines the structural decline in fee-based revenue capture by Layer 1 (L1) blockchains, arguing that high transaction fees are systematically eroded by innovation, making them unsustainable as a primary valuation driver.
Bitcoin’s fee spikes during congestion periods (e.g., 2017 and 2021 rallies) were rapidly mitigated by scaling solutions like SegWit, batching, and the Lightning Network. By 2025, daily fees fell to just $300k, under 1% of miner revenue, despite higher USD transaction volumes. Ordinals and Runes provided brief fee surges but were short-lived.
Ethereum’s DeFi and NFT booms drove quarterly fees to $4.3 billion in late 2021. However, competing L1s and L2 rollups (e.g., Arbitrum, Optimism) diverted activity. The Dencun upgrade (EIP-4844) drastically reduced data costs for L2s, causing Ethereum’s L1 fee revenue to collapse by over 90% from its peak, falling below $15 million per quarter by late 2025.
Solana’s revenue relies heavily on MEV and priority fees from memecoin trading, which peaked in early 2025. However, private AMMs (e.g., HumidiFi) and off-chain order flow (e.g., Hyperliquid’s HyperCore) have captured over 50% of DEX volume, reducing Solana’s MEV fees by more than 90% from their January 2025 highs.
Hyperliquid currently dominates perps trading, earning $600 million in 2025, but its fee model (4.5 bps per trade) is vastly more expensive than traditional finance (e.g., CME). As institutional adoption grows, pressure to compress fees will intensify, challenging its token valuation.
The report concludes that L1 tokens are increasingly weak as fee-capturing assets. Valuation drivers have shifted toward staking yields, ETF flows, RWA narratives, and macro liquidity—factors more tied to speculative demand than fundamental utility. Bitcoin remains an exception: its security depends not on fees but on continuous price appreciation to offset halvings, making its model uniquely fragile and narrative-dependent.
Odaily星球日报02/26 08:39
