Key Takeaways:
- Meteora generated $1.25 billion in protocol fees in 2025, ranking first across all DeFi platforms
- Only three DeFi protocols crossed the $1B mark, highlighting rising fee concentration at the top
- DEXs and Solana-based protocols gained share as users favored speed, capital efficiency, and lower costs
Meteora emerged as the highest-earning DeFi protocol of 2025, reflecting a broader shift in where on-chain activity, liquidity, and user demand are concentrating. Fee data shows a DeFi market that is maturing, more competitive, and increasingly selective.
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Meteora Takes the Lead in DeFi Fee Generation
Meteora closed 2025 with $1.25 billion in total fees, placing it ahead of every other decentralized finance protocol by revenue. The figure signals more than just strong usage; it shows sustained trading volume, deep liquidity, and high user retention across the year.
Trailing Meteora were Jupiter with $1.11 billion and Uniswap with $1.06 billion, making them the only other protocols to exceed the billion-dollar threshold. Whereas dozens of DeFi networks continued to exist, the generation of fees began to be concentrated in the hands of a small number of large entities.
The ranking supports a major trend: users are diverting volume to protocols which mix speed, small slip, predictable execution, as opposed to dispersing liquidity to fragmented venues.
Top DeFi Protocols by 2025 Fee Revenue
The top three were only marginally ahead of the other protocols which had strong figures, but on the other hand failed to reach the $1B mark. Pump.fun was registered with fees of $937 million, as a result of high-frequency traffic and startups of speculative tokens. Hyperliquid was close behind with $909 million, as it enjoyed the derivatives demand and the active trading communities.
There was also a good performance of liquid staking and lending protocols. Lido collected $846 million, Jito raised $813 million, and Aave received $809 million, which supports the idea of yield, staking, and leverage as some of the most important sources of DeFi revenue.
Raydium and PancakeSwap took up the top, but smaller yet rapidly expanding protocols, such as Fragment and Ethena, still claim hundreds of millions in fees. The statistics indicate that there is good competition, but it is also a growing disparity between the market leaders and others.
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Why Solana-Based DeFi Is Gaining Ground
The emergence of Meteora is pegged on the performance of Solana in 2025. Solana-native protocols became more appealing to active traders and liquidity providers due to faster block times, reduced fees, and better stability on its network.
Execution Speed and Capital Efficiency
Large-volume traders are becoming more concerned with the quality of execution. The design of Solana enables protocols such as Meteora or Jupiter to provide tighter spreads and confirmations in a significantly shorter time, which directly converts to high capture of fees.
The reduced transaction costs also make possible the strategies that are not feasible on more expensive networks, making activity overall more active without reducing the returns on users.
DEXs Narrow the Gap with Centralized Exchanges
Decentralized exchanges started to rise in 2025 and over 20 percent of the total crypto trading volume was captured in peak times. Although the overall volume remains centralized, the distance between these two systems dropped with the improvement of DEX user experience.
Genuine or more intelligent routing, enhanced wallet integrations, and friction were diminished. The distinction between the centralized and decentralized execution was also blurred to many users, particularly in the spot and on-chain derivatives trade.
Fee data reflects this shift. DEXs no longer have to compete with centralized venues in terms of ideology or self-custody principles only.
Institutions Quietly Drive DeFi Fee Growth
Even though institutional involvement was less apparent than retail, this trend was increasingly contributing to 2025 DeFi revenues. On-chain lending markets were invested in by asset managers, and DeFi rails were added behind the scenes by fintech companies.
Large exchanges experimented with tokenized assets, stablecoin settlement and blockchain-based credit, directing their operations via DeFi protocols instead of conventional intermediaries. Such flows are typically big, steady, and cost-effective and prefer protocols that have known infrastructure. Consequently, there is an increase in fee growth as a structural adoption and not necessarily due to speculative cycles.
Source: https://www.cryptoninjas.net/news/meteora-dominates-defi-in-2025-with-1-25b-fees-outpacing-uniswap-jupiter-and-aave/
