In 2023, The Top Five DeFi Protocols By Revenue

Since its inception by DeFi Pulse in 2019, total value locked (TVL) has emerged as a principal metric for evaluating the effectiveness of a protocol, as stated by Blockworks. Nevertheless, there are those who contend that TVL has the potential to distort the intrinsic worth of a protocol and propose revenue as a substitute metric. The following are the five most lucrative DeFi protocols in 2023:

1. Maker—$95.91 million: Since 2022, Maker has acquired US Treasury bonds in an incremental fashion in order to capitalize on rising interest rates and earn a return. Investors were granted access to the T-bill yield via a secured variant of its DAI stablecoin via its Spark Protocol subDAO.

2. Lido, worth $55.79 million, leveraged Ethereum's transition to proof-of-stake in 2022 to its advantage by enabling users to stake their ether on the platform in return for tokenized staked ether (stETH). StETH emerged as the ninth most prominent cryptocurrency, amassing a market capitalization exceeding $20 billion.

3. PancakeSwap, with a volume of $52.31 million, ranks second in terms of magnitude among decentralized exchanges (DEXs), trailing only Uniswap. In March, the DEX introduced version 3 of its platform, which emphasized concentrated liquidity and a gaming marketplace.

Convex Finance, which raised $42.23 million, is an asset management protocol that enables stakers and liquidity providers to earn a yield by securing tokens issued by Curve. A third of vote-escrowed Frax tokens and 48% of vote-escrowed Curve tokens are under the control of Convex.

5. GMX — $37.52 million: GMX enables DeFi traders to execute highly leveraged transactions without requiring substantial capital. It is a perpetual swap exchange. As determined by TVL, GMX is the most extensive protocol on Arbitrum and received the greatest grant allocation for layer-2 in October.