No shortage of debates surrounding protocol fees and valuations, but what does the data say? We covered this in our Onchain Revenue Report - now let’s do a deeper dive on causation. While many factors dictate token prices, the data suggests fundamentals are chief among them 👇
We test causation using Granger causality. Post-2021 data show that DeFi fees do Granger-cause DeFi market caps: four test statistics put the probability of “no causation” at <1% for 1–6-month horizons.
Other sectors are noisier, so let’s zoom into protocol-level data:
• 1,300+ protocols in the dataset
• 406 with sufficient fee + valuation history
• 220 pass basic statistical checks
• 131 show fees → marketcap Granger causality
• 101 show no reverse causality
For these 101 protocols, fee changes up to six months prior Granger-predict changes in market caps.
The effect is meaningful: a 1% log-fee increase (lag 1) corresponds to ~0.5% average market-cap growth (with median r^2 of that regression 0.24)
tl;dr: there are protocols where the data tells you that market prices change based on their onchain fees. Here are some of them:
A few noteworthy examples that have granger-causality, but in both directions: @XRP_Alerts, @SuiNetwork, @ton_blockchain, @JupiterExchange, @LidoFinance, @arbitrum, @rendernetwork, @AxieInfinity, @zksync
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