Tether makes the most money in crypto, and it is not close. Over the last 30 days it retained $481.74 million in revenue, against $193.08 million for Circle in second place. Canton (@CantonNetwork) is third with $56.1 million, less than an eighth of what Tether keeps.
They do charge fees, but the fees barely matter. Circle books $653 million of its $694 million in Q1 2026 revenue as reserve income, the interest on the T-bills and cash backing $USDC. Everything else it charges for, cross-chain transfers included, came to $42 million. The float is the business. Usage is a rounding error on it.
Why Fees, Revenue and Profit Are Three Different Numbers
DefiLlama splits its data across two pages, and the gap between them is the story.
Fees are what users pay. Revenue is what the protocol keeps after paying out liquidity providers, stakers, rebates, and referral cuts. For most businesses on the board, that gap is wide. For the two at the top, it barely exists. Tether’s fees and revenue over 30 days are identical, and Circle keeps $193.08 million of the $193.97 million it collects.
Retained is still not profit. A company has staff, servers, lawyers, and compliance costs. A protocol may distribute its revenue directly to token holders through buybacks or burns, which benefits holders and is not corporate income. Read the leaderboard as cash flow, not earnings.
The 30-Day Leaderboard
Ranked by revenue retained, as of July 15, 2026:
- Tether (stablecoin issuer): $481.74 million
- Circle (stablecoin issuer): $193.08 million
- Canton (chain): $56.1 million
- Hyperliquid (perps DEX): $44.31 million
- Pump (launchpad): $28.25 million
- Tron (chain): $26.33 million
- Polymarket (prediction market): $22.36 million
The next eleven names below Circle add up to $242.91 million between them. Tether alone earns nearly double that.
Why Do the Stablecoin Issuers Win?
Almost none of it comes from charging people to trade. It comes from what the reserves earn while sitting there.
@tether runs the simplest business in the industry: take dollars, issue tokens, park the dollars in short-dated government debt, keep the interest. By the end of 2025 that meant $122 billion in Treasuries inside $193 billion of total assets, backing over $186 billion of $USDT in circulation, with $6.3 billion in excess reserves on top.
Its leaderboard number is only that interest income. Profit is another matter: of the $5.7 billion Tether netted in the first half of 2025, $3.1 billion was recurring reserve income and $2.6 billion was mark-to-market gains on the gold and Bitcoin sitting alongside the Treasuries. The revenue table sees the first number and not the second.
@circle runs the same engine with a public balance sheet, which makes the costs visible. Full-year 2025 revenue and reserve income came to $2.7 billion, up 64%, but the company still posted a $70 million net loss from continuing operations, hit by $424 million in stock compensation tied to IPO vesting. The Q1 2026 accounts show where the money actually went: $407 million of that quarter’s revenue was spent on distribution, transaction, and other costs. Net income was $55 million.
That is the nuance a revenue column cannot show. Circle keeps $193 million a month on the leaderboard. Its own filings show most of the reserve yield leaves the building, much of it to Coinbase.
The Trading Businesses Underneath
Below the issuers, the ranking changes depending on which column you sort.
@Pumpfun took $74.47 million in user fees over 30 days, the third-largest 30-day fee take on the board, ahead of Uniswap. It kept $28.25 million of that, roughly 38%, with the rest going to creators, cashback, and buybacks.
@HyperliquidX collected $62.19 million and retained $44.31 million, the highest conversion of any trading venue on the table. Almost all of it is routed to the Assistance Fund to buy $HYPE on the open market. The protocol earns hard, then spends it on its own token. Holders benefit. The company, in any conventional sense, does not bank it.
@Polymarket kept $22.36 million from $48.35 million paid in, a sign that prediction markets have turned into a real fee business rather than a curiosity.
@Uniswap is the clearest example of why fees mislead. Over the last 24 hours, it ranked third on the entire fee table at $5.97 million, spread across 47 chains. It does not appear in the revenue top 13 at all, a list that cuts off at $270,270. Uniswap collects more from users than almost any other protocol in crypto and keeps under 5% of it, because the rest belongs to liquidity providers.
Chains sit at the other extreme. Canton and Tron (@trondao) burn their fees outright, which is why their revenue lines match their fee lines exactly: $56.1 million and $26.33 million destroyed. Nobody collects a paycheck from that. The value, if any, shows up in supply.
What About the Exchanges?
Everything above is on-chain. The largest crypto businesses in the world do not appear on that table at all.
@binance is the biggest and the hardest to pin down. It publishes no audited financials. Its own year-end report claims $34 trillion in total product volume for 2025 and spot volume above $7.1 trillion. Forbes has estimated revenue in the $16 billion to $17 billion range for 2024 and 2025, against a roughly 38% share of global spot trading.
@coinbase is the one with audited numbers, and they show a trading business under real pressure. Full-year 2025 revenue was $7.2 billion, up 9%, with a $667 million net loss in Q4 alone. Q1 2026 total revenue came in at $1.41 billion, down 31% year on year, with a $394.1 million net loss and a $482.4 million unrealized loss on crypto held for investment. Adjusted EBITDA stayed positive at $303 million, the 13th straight quarter. The one line that grew was stablecoin revenue, at $305 million against $274 million a year earlier. The biggest exchange in America now leans on the same T-bill yield as Tether and Circle, taken as a cut of Circle’s reserve income.
The Squeeze Already Started
Circle’s reserve return rate hit 3.5% in Q1 2026, down 66 basis points in a year as SOFR fell. Revenue declined with it, from $770 million in Q4 2025 to $694 million in Q1 2026, while average $USDC circulation grew 39% over the same period. Net income fell 15%.
Tether tells the same story with more zeroes. It cleared over $10 billion in 2025 against over $13 billion in 2024, a 23% drop. It did that in the year it pushed $USDT to a record circulation and its Treasury exposure, direct and indirect, to a record $141 billion.
Both companies grew the float to all-time highs and took home less money. Everyone else on the leaderboard is fighting for trading activity. The two at the top are fighting the rate cycle.
Sources
- DefiLlama Revenue – Live rankings of fees retained by protocols and chains across 24h, 7d and 30d windows.
- DefiLlama Fees – Total fees paid by users, with per-protocol definitions of what counts as revenue.
- Tether – Q4 2025 attestation announcement covering 2025 profits, excess reserves and Treasury exposure.
- Tether Q2 2025 attestation – First-half 2025 profit split between recurring reserve income and gold and bitcoin gains.
- Circle Q1 2026 results – Reserve income, distribution costs, net income and reserve return rate for the quarter.
- Circle FY 2025 results – Full-year revenue, net loss and $USDC circulation figures.
- Coinbase Form 10-Q – Q1 2026 revenue breakdown filed with the SEC.
- Coinbase Q4 2025 shareholder letter – Full-year 2025 revenue and Q4 net loss.
- Binance 2025 year-end report – Self-reported trading volume, user and market share metrics.
