Plain-language explainers for how blockchains earn, and how the top chains compare.
INTERACTIVE COURSE · ETHEREUM
An interactive journey through the technical foundations of Ethereum. From basic concepts to advanced topics like DeFi, the EVM, and zero-knowledge proofs.
Open Master Ethereum Interactively ↗
Based on Mastering Ethereum, built by David Ziming Liu, CTO of Uniblock.
EXPLAINER · PEER-TO-PEER SWAPS
A DEX, or Decentralized Exchange, is a peer-to-peer marketplace where users can swap cryptocurrencies directly from their own digital wallets. Unlike centralized exchanges (CEXs) like Coinbase or Binance, a DEX does not hold your funds. Instead, it uses blockchain-based smart contracts to automate trades.
Instead of matching individual buyers and sellers, most modern DEXs use an Automated Market Maker (AMM) system.
Different blockchains host different DEX ecosystems. Some of the most widely used decentralized exchanges include:
EXPLAINER · TWO WAYS TO SIZE CRYPTO
Both are price × quantity, so both rise and fall with price. The difference is the quantity being valued. Follow either column heading to its full explainer.
| Market cap (per token) | Total Value Locked (TVL) by Chains | |
|---|---|---|
| Formula | price × circulating supply | Σ (tokens locked × current price) |
| What “quantity” means | a token's entire circulating supply, wherever it sits (wallets, exchanges, cold storage) | only the assets deposited or locked in DeFi smart contracts |
| How many assets | one token at a time | many different assets, added up |
| What it measures | the market's total valuation of that asset | capital actually deployed into DeFi on a chain |
| Double-counting | each coin counted once | can be inflated (looping / restaking counts the same dollar twice) |
EXPLAINER · PRICE × CIRCULATING SUPPLY
Market capitalization (market cap) is the total US-dollar value of a single token's circulating supply. It is the standard way to rank cryptoassets by size.
Market cap = current price × circulating supply
Circulating supply is the number of coins actually in circulation; it excludes tokens that are locked, not yet minted, or burned. Using the maximum possible supply instead gives a different figure, the fully-diluted valuation (FDV).
Because it is price × quantity, market cap moves with price: if a token's price doubles, its market cap doubles even if not a single new coin entered circulation. That is why a lot of any market-cap chart's movement is really the crypto price cycle, not coins being issued or removed.
EXPLAINER · DEPOSITS VS ACTIVITY
Total Value Locked (TVL) is the total dollar value of everything the crypto community has deposited into a blockchain's apps. It's the closest thing DeFi has to a “size of the business” number.
Think of a blockchain like a digital city, and its DeFi apps like the banks, exchanges, and lending desks operating in that city. TVL is the total amount of money customers have parked inside those institutions: savings in the bank, collateral with the lender, cash on the trading desk's books. In traditional finance you'd call this deposits or assets under management (AUM). A bank with $100B in deposits is clearly bigger and more trusted than one with $100M, and TVL is used the same way to size up a blockchain.
Anyone can make a website look busy. It's much harder to fake people locking real money into a smart contract. So a rising TVL is read as a trust-and-adoption signal: more capital is willing to live on that chain. It's also the raw material DeFi runs on: the liquidity you trade against, the collateral you borrow against, the stake that secures yield. More deposited capital means deeper, more capable markets.
TVL = Σ (tokens locked × price per token)
The Σ (“sigma”) simply means add it all up: for every asset a protocol holds, multiply the number of tokens by its current price, then sum those values across all assets and all protocols on the chain.
Three things that surprise newcomers
A chain needs some deposited capital (TVL) to function; you can't trade against liquidity that isn't there. But how efficiently a chain turns that parked capital into actual activity varies enormously. Analysts capture this with simple ratios: Volume ÷ TVL (capital efficiency: how many times the parked money gets used) and annualised Fees ÷ TVL (the “yield” the chain's capital is generating).
A useful mental model to end on: TVL is the deposits; fees and volume are the revenue and the foot traffic. A chain can hold a huge pile of deposits yet do modest trading (capital sitting in savings), or hold a smaller pile that's traded furiously all day (a hyperactive trading floor). Comparing the two side by side is where the real insight lives.
RANKED BY DEX VOLUME · 2026 YTD VS 2025
| Chain | DEX vol 2025 | Fees 2025 | Fee/Vol bps 2025 | DEX vol 2026 YTD ▼ | Fees 2026 YTD | Fee/Vol bps 2026 YTD | Dominant fee type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solana | $1.66T | $7.3B | 44.0 | $609.9B | $2.1B | 33.8 | DEX swaps + priority/MEV fees |
| Ethereum | $952.9B | $6.2B | 65.5 | $321.5B | $2.6B | 80.6 | Base-layer gas (L1) + DeFi |
| BSC | $735.8B | $846.6M | 11.5 | $244.1B | $310.2M | 12.7 | DEX swaps + cheap gas |
| Base | $408.3B | $943.2M | 23.1 | $209.2B | $509.6M | 24.4 | L2 sequencer + DEX swaps |
| Arbitrum | $249.7B | $468.6M | 18.8 | $72.1B | $181.5M | 25.2 | L2 sequencer + DEX/perps |
| Hyperliquid L1 | $160.9B | $1.1B | 67.7 | $65.5B | $773.0M | 118.0 | Perps trading fees |
| Polygon | $52.8B | $124.0M | 23.5 | $61.1B | $264.3M | 43.3 | Gas + DEX swaps |
| Avalanche | $93.9B | $196.1M | 20.9 | $26.4B | $65.0M | 24.6 | Gas + DEX swaps |
| Robinhood Chain | — | — | — | $24.0B | $148.8M | 62.0 | Gas + DEX swaps |
| Near | $20.0B | $21.7M | 10.8 | $20.3B | $28.8M | 14.2 | Gas + DEX swaps |
| Sui | $138.5B | $201.4M | 14.5 | $20.3B | $34.2M | 16.9 | Gas + DEX swaps |
| Monad | $3.4B | $6.6M | 19.5 | $14.1B | $31.3M | 22.2 | Gas + DEX swaps (new L1) |
| edgeX L1 | $510.4M | $223.1M | 4370.8 | $13.7B | $116.3M | 85.1 | Perps / order-book DEX |
| Tron | $43.3B | $59.4M | 13.7 | $12.2B | $53.1M | 43.5 | Stablecoin-transfer gas (USDT) |
| Spark | $24.3M | — | 0.0 | $8.5B | — | 0.0 | Lending / stablecoin (minimal swap fees) |
| THORChain | $31.9B | $22.4M | 7.0 | $6.2B | $3.2M | 5.2 | Gas + DEX swaps |
| OP Mainnet | $21.2B | $36.6M | 17.3 | $5.6B | $26.4M | 47.4 | L2 sequencer + DEX |
| Dexalot | $13.5B | $198.1K | 0.1 | $3.4B | $104.9K | 0.3 | Order-book DEX (own L1) |
| Chainflip | $4.9B | $11.7M | 24.1 | $3.2B | $7.7M | 24.4 | Gas + DEX swaps |
| Unichain | $72.0B | $42.5M | 5.9 | $2.8B | $3.1M | 11.4 | L2 sequencer + DEX |
Spot DEX volume and total protocol fees per chain, 2025 full year vs 2026 year-to-date. Fee/Vol = (fees ÷ DEX volume) × 10,000, shown in basis points (1 bp = 0.01%), a rough read on how “expensive” each chain's activity is: high bps usually means a perps/derivatives chain or expensive base-layer gas; low bps means cheap, stablecoin- or RWA-routing venues. The Dominant fee type is an editorial classification (DeFiLlama exposes no per-chain fee-category field). Source: DeFiLlama.