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