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Metrics need to evolve past these top line values for the space to be taken seriously. Back in the early days, these metrics were probably a decent indicator of activity and where attention was focused, but they need to be changed in the era of sub-cent transactions and airdrop farming. Monthly Active Users used to mean something when the cost to be a user was a few bucks in gas on L1's, but now the cost to be a 'user' is less than a cent, 2-3 orders of magnitide reduction of cost opens up the potential for spam. The Uniswap airdrop rewarded just being a one time active user, and tools like DEX Screener reward metrics around number of swaps and unique addresses swapping, which incentivizes this spam further. Filtering out addresses with very small lifetime tx value or binning will show where meaningful activity is. Transactions are mostly ia reflection of the above above, the question is what is the activity behind the transactions. Arbitrage is different from 1c buy of a meme coin is different from dusting addresses is different from lending is different from voting tx etc. Again, filter or binning would show what is happening, not 'how much stuff reguardless of value'. Trading volume should be categorized. Stable-stable swaps when fees are a fraction of a bps is different from arbitriage between AMMs and prop AMMs which is differnt from stable-major swaps/CEX-DEX arbitriage which is different from alt-stable swaps etc. Here is is just all lumped up together and loses meaning. This does not even consider when the sole LP is also the biggest trader, paying fees only to themselves, which can let them bot a nearly unlimited volume for only tx cost (which is sub cent per tx on L2's and Solana). Application fees are better, but again, it is important for who is paying who and why. Someone paying launch pad fees is likely only doing so in the hopes of gaining more on a memelaunch than they pay in fees, esp. if the launcher is a bot. Which applications are making revenue (and also, where does that revenue go) is important context. Revenue is also better, but similarly, who is paying who and where does that value go? What cost is paid to get access to the revenue and is that revenue stream sustainable? Imporant factors that do not get reflected in top line numbers. Transfer volume- see above, if not worse. TVL- on the chain level some of this is just where CEX park funds. At one point Binance held like 90% of the USDT on Optimism where it just sat partked. In lending, is the lending being incentivized (Plasma had tons of TVL in lending because it was paying a premium, most of which moved out as additional rewards decreased). In DEX's it used to mean better execution in the k=y*x days, but concentrated liquidity now means active LP managment is far more important for execution than TVL in a given pool. Dev activity- contracts deployed? See meme launches above. New protocols? Do they have TVL or real activity? Again, what is the activity is more important than the amount of activity. Deploying 1000 forks of Uniswap is differnet than a single new primitative being built. Stablecoin supply- some signal here, but also see the Binance on Optimism comment above and the TVL in lending. Who owns the supply, where is it deployed, and why all matter. Basically, all of these metrics can get massivly skewed by a relativly small number of actors paying relativly small transactions fees. If those actors have incentives to push metrics one way or another, they pretty easily can. Anyone looking to actually build on these permissionless systems is going to dig into these metrics to understand them beyond the top line numbers. They will be broken down and scrutinized. If major integrations by traditional finance are not matching up with top line metrics, it is probably because someone cracked the tape and understood the breakdown of activity rather than basing their decision on the numbers that sound good in a slidedeck.