Looking at last week’s fee distribution across the major chains, the rankings tell a different story than the raw activity metrics would suggest.
Hyperliquid leads all chains with about 43% of the market share in fees and generated about $11 million last week. Fees are primarily determined by perpetual bond trading activity, where users pay to open, hold and close leveraged positions.
The chain has grown its share significantly over the past year, reflecting the rapid migration of derivatives traders to its purpose-built infrastructure.
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Ethereum gains about 13% of about $3 million, derived from a broader mix of DeFi interactions, smart contract executions, and token transfers. The post-Dencun compensation compression is visible here relative to the historical dominance of this chart.
Solana is recording about 10% of about $2 million, a notable gap from his DEX volume share and a reminder that high-frequency, low-cost memecoin trading does not efficiently translate into fee income.
Bitcoin’s share is relatively small. With Ordinals and Runes activity having declined sharply from their 2024 peaks, the network has largely returned to its basic use of money transfers, which at current activity levels generates limited fee revenue relative to its market capitalization.
Compensation market share is becoming an increasingly useful lens for assessing which chains have sustainable, monetizable operations versus chains that run on speculative transit. Hyperliquid’s dominance is especially notable given that it is a purpose-built application chain rather than a general-purpose Tier 1, suggesting that vertical specialization may be a more effective fee capture strategy than horizontal scale.