Desk

Protocol economics

Where protocol revenue comes from, who it accrues to, and whether the accounting survives contact with a downturn.

Coverage

Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade locks devnet scope around enshrined proposer-builder separation and a 200m gas target

Ethereum client teams locked the devnet-0 specification for the Glamsterdam upgrade in June 2026, with enshrined proposer-builder separation (EIP-7732) and block-level access lists (EIP-7928) as the central changes. The bundle targets a 200 million gas limit…

17 Jun 2026 ethereum.org: Glamsterdam roadmap 4 reports

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Protocol economics

Solana's Alpenglow consensus rewrite activates on a community validator test cluster

Alpenglow, which replaces Solana's TowerBFT consensus with the Votor and Rotor components, activated on a community validator test cluster on 11 May 2026. The design targets…

11 May 2026 Solana Developer Forums: SIMD-0326: Proposal for the New Alpenglow Consensus Protocol 4 reports

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Decentralised finance

Aave passes $1tn in cumulative lending volume

Aave reported cumulative lending volume above $1tn in late February 2026, the first decentralised credit protocol to reach that figure. The protocol attributed part of the growth…

26 Feb 2026 Aave: governance forum 3 reports

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Governance

Uniswap activates protocol fee switch, directing swap fees to UNI buybacks and burns

Uniswap governance activated the protocol fee switch on Ethereum on 28 December 2025, redirecting a share of swap fees to protocol revenue used for UNI buybacks and burns, and…

28 Dec 2025 Uniswap governance forum 4 reports

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Concepts on this desk

Governance token voting concentration

Delegated voting power in the largest onchain protocols is distributed with Gini coefficients above 0.94, and in some cases a single delegate can carry a proposal alone, which makes the binding constraint on a decision arithmetic rather than persuasion.
Maximal extractable value

Whoever decides the order of transactions in a block holds an option on every trade inside it, and that option is now auctioned to specialist builders and paid through to the validator who proposes the block.
Protocol revenue and value accrual

Between the fee a user pays and any income a token holder receives sit liquidity providers, node operators, loss buffers and a governance vote that can redirect the whole flow, which is why gross fees and holder income differ by an order of magnitude.
Seigniorage and float income

Circle earned $653m on the USDC reserve in the March 2026 quarter and paid $407m of that away to the firms whose customers hold the balances, which is the clearest published account of where this rent actually settles.
Staking economics and slashing

Validator income is protocol issuance plus priority fees and ordering revenue, less operating cost; the penalty schedule is deliberately mild for isolated error and severe for correlated failure, so what it prices is independence rather than uptime.
Total value locked

The headline size measure for onchain protocols, and the one most sensitive to bookkeeping: wrapping, restaking and borrowing can each count the same deposited dollar again, and a price fall shrinks the number without anyone withdrawing.

On the record

28 December 2025
Uniswap governance activates the protocol fee switch
18 December 2017
Single-collateral Dai activated by MKR vote
30 July 2015
Ethereum's Frontier release produces the genesis block
1 November 2008
Bitcoin white paper circulated on the Cryptography mailing list

Full timeline →

Protocol economics

Coverage

The weekly read on onchain market economics