Meteora, Jupiter and Uniswap led all decentralized finance protocols in 2025 by fee revenue, each generating over $1 billion for the year. The platforms topped an industry that saw banks launch stablecoins, asset managers allocate billions to DeFi lenders and Wall Street firms enter tokenized assets.
What Happened: Revenue Leaders
Meteora generated $1.25 billion in fees during 2025, according to data from Cryptodiffer. Jupiter followed with $1.11 billion and Uniswap collected $1.06 billion.
Pump.fun recorded $937 million in fees while Hyperliquid brought in $909 million. Lido generated $846 million, Jito collected $813 million and Aave earned $809 million.
Raydium and Pancake rounded out the top 10 with $856 million and $574 million respectively. Additional protocols including Fragment ($389 million) and Ethena ($385 million) also ranked among leading fee generators.
Traditional finance integration accelerated throughout the year.
Coinbase launched Morpho-powered Bitcoin loans in January, while Robinhood began using Arbitrum to facilitate tokenized stock trading for European users in June.
Revolut, a $75 billion neobank, integrated Uniswap two weeks ago for onramping, swaps and crypto purchases. Stripe announced plans to launch its Tempo blockchain as fintech firms entered the blockchain space.
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Why It Matters: Industry Transformation
Dollar-pegged tokens in circulation soared to more than $300 billion during 2025. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and family office managers issued predictions for exponential stablecoin growth.
Jascha Samadi, co-founder of Greenfield Capital, said unified liquidity layers will make "stablecoin transfers and conversions become more capital efficient, cheaper, and more predictable."
Decentralized exchanges challenged their centralized counterparts in 2025. Improved user experience and intents-based trading made some DEXs competitive with traditional platforms.
DEXs accounted for just over 21% of all crypto trading as of November — their highest percentage ever — according to a CoinGecko analysis using DefiLlama data. Privacy-focused blockchain Zcash rallied 860% in the year's final three months, with its ZEC token hitting $711 in November.
The Ethereum Foundation announced an expanded effort to embed privacy into the $284 billion blockchain. Alan Scott, co-founder of the Railgun privacy protocol, said private multi-signature wallets are "a prerequisite for many institutions looking to make the jump onchain."
Stablecoin issuers moved to address liquidity fragmentation across trading venues and blockchains. Circle developed its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol for transferring USDC across blockchains, while Tether launched USDT0 as an omnichain stablecoin.
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