The DeFi space keeps talking about which DeFi protocols survive.
Wrong question.
@CurveFinance already survived.
The intriguing part is that it won, and still doesn’t monetize the way most people think it should.
According to DefiLlama:
• $647K revenue over the last 30 days
• $152K revenue over the last 7 days
For one of the most important pieces of DeFi infrastructure, those numbers feel surprisingly low.
But that’s the point.
CT still assumes:
• more usage means more value.
• more integrations means more revenue.
• more dependence means better economics.
It doesn’t work like that.
The more essential infrastructure becomes, the more everyone expects it to be cheap.
Same pattern we’ve seen elsewhere:
• roads.
• internet bandwidth.
• cloud storage.
The value doesn’t always stay in the infrastructure.
It often moves up the stack to whoever owns the user relationship:
• interfaces.
• aggregators.
• exchanges.
Curve might be more important than a lot of protocols.
That doesn't mean it's where the economics end up.