YashasEdu

In TradFi, a cashcow is a business that prints money with minimal reinvestment.

In DeFi these are the protocols generating real revenue from real usage.

It's the filter worth using because:
1. TVL can be gamed
2. Narratives change every 2-3 months

But revenue comes from demand and demand doesn't lie. I always use 90d revenue here instead of 30d because it filters out noise and those one-off spikes.

But revenue alone doesn't make a cash cow. Here's the filter:

1. Net margin = how much it actually keeps out of every dollar earned 
2. Earnings trend = is it getting better or worse at keeping it
3. Compare within categories, not across (different businesses, different margins)

I ran the top 20 through that filter and got the top real cashcows.

➣ $CAKE : $57M rev, 93% net margin. Earnings +63.6% over 90d
➣ $AAVE : $33.1M rev, 82% net margin. Earnings +234.9% over 90d
➣ $COW : $9M rev, 42% net margin but earnings growth is +788.7% over 90d
➣ $HYPE: $175.6M rev, 100% fee-to-revenue retention. Revenue king by far but net earnings data isn't available to confirm true margin
➣ $GMGN: $38.6M rev, 100% fee-to-revenue retention

Remember the real cash cows aren't always the biggest revenue numbers. They're the ones 

Making money ⭢ keeping money ⭢ getting better at it every quarter

Stablecoins didn't contract during this drawdown. Total mcap still above $300B (up 50% from early 2025)

Retail is clearly picking $BNB chain to transfer their stables👇

1. 5% of global stablecoin supply but 40% of all stablecoin transactions
2. 13.7M active addresses in January alone
3. 99% of transfers under $10K

$BTC bounced from $64.8K ⭢ $69.4K in hours. Sitting at $68.2K now.

Looks like a good bounce but:
‣ large holders quietly sold ~90K BTC ($5.8B) in 12 days
‣ realized losses are dominating (historically that lasts 6+ months)

At the same time, hedge funds just flipped net long for the first time since April 2025 while weekly RSI at its lowest since June 2022, which was the bottom.

US-Iran talks are scheduled today. We're in peak uncertain times.

Wall Street is moving deeper into crypto:

Last week, Apollo struck a deal to support onchain lending markets for the first time in history.

The deal allows Apollo to acquire up to 90M $MORPHO tokens over 48 months.

Just days before that, BlackRock announced it is purchasing $UNI tokens alongside its integration of its tokenized BUIDL fund onto Uniswap, where it will be traded by institutions.

On February 2nd, Jupiter, the world's leading onchain platform, struck a deal for a $35M investment from ParaFi Capital, investing directly in the platform's $JUP

Onchain institutional investment activity is heating up.

What are the low-risk Defi options for $ETH ???  

This was one of the most searched questions on Google.

Low-risk Defi used to be constrained by regulatory barriers and smart contract safety risks. Both problems have greatly improved.

For many people worldwide, defi today is in some cases already safer than tradfi.

Out of >$20B in vaults on Ethereum and L2s, 93% of stablecoin TVL is earning under 5% APY.

• 58% earns <3% APY
• 35% earns 3–5% APY
• 5% earns 5–10% APY
• 2% earns >10% APY

Hedge funds just flipped net long on BTC futures for the first time since April 2025.

They've been short since Q3 while $BTC dropped 50%.

Historically, when positioning flips while sentiment is at rock bottom, relief rallies follow.

Bitcoin has decoupled from the stock market

Historically, BTC has moved in tandem with the S&P 500:

• Economic growth and low rates → stocks and crypto rose
• Rising rates and fear → both markets fell

But in the last 6 months, there has been a strong divergence, for example, since the end of August:

• Gold: +51%
• S&P 500: +7%
• BTC: –43%

When the correlation returns, $BTC often starts a sharp movement to catch up with the market, especially if a cycle of rate cuts and liquidity return begins.

Crypto and Tradfi are converging on the same architecture but just from opposite directions.

➥ Bilateral OTC derivatives settle privately
➥ Exchange traded products use public price feeds

That split exists today where execution is private and settlement is public. Canton Network is building the private side of that split as blockchain infra.

All of these privacy features are into the transaction model👇

1. Sub-transaction confidentiality
2. Legal enforceability
3. Identified counterparties

Which is a reason they completed cross-border intraday repo using tokenized Gilts with DTCC, Citadel, Euroclear and Tradeweb on the network.

This is also the chain that barely gets mentioned is generating 3-4x more fee revenue than the most talked-about L1s.

➥ $CC : $3.09M
➥ $ETH : ~$320K
➥ $SOL : ~$775K

Bitcoin has never been this oversold before.

Every time Bitcoin has been this oversold, the next 6-12 months followed by recovery:

- 2022 (Luna/FTX crash) → RSI 28.3 → +85% recovery
- COVID Crash 2020 → RSI 26.4 → +160%+ recovery
- 2018 Bear Market → RSI ~28 → +108% recovery

Look at the history. LFG $BTC

Boros crosses $10B in cumulative volume.

Yesterday it did $220M in volume.

Almost $100M $PENDLE is locked.

The non-commercial traders of $BTC futures are usually the smart money.

This week's COT Report shows that they are moving net long with some urgency.

Look back at what the last two similar excursions led to.

But remember, this is "a condition, not a signal".

Tokenized commodities hit $6.1B mcap while crypto is dumping.

The main reason behind this is the growth of tokenized gold (99% share), which is now 0.02% of the total gold market which is $36.1T

➢ $XAU is up 187% in 6 months
➢ $PAXG is at $2.4B

Also if you want leverage, you can trade the same on Ostium too.

Same rails that made stablecoins work in emerging markets will distribute gold exposure to the same people. Tokenisation is building real financial infra on crypto rails and I'm loving it.

x402 volume is starting to pick back up to Q4/2025 level

Key driver to the increase is $VIRTUAL

Majority of the demand (99%+) comes from agent-to-agent services from Virtuals ACP (e.g. data queries, swaps, workflows, and inferences)

The increase in volume came 2 weeks after the announcement of $1M monthly incentives supporting productive agents within the ACP network.

So Anthropic caught DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax running 24,000+ fake accounts to extract Claude's capabilities (16M+ exchanges)

Recently OpenAI had also told Congress DeepSeek is using obfuscated methods to keep distilling US models.

But honestly this was always going to happen.

Labs trained on the entire internet without asking are now upset because someone's doing it back to them through an API. The hypocrisy is hard to ignore.

> Export controls won't fix this
> You can restrict chips
> You can't restrict outputs

China will keep finding workarounds like they always do.

1,006,353 $BTC only.

That’s less than 5% off all the supply remaining to be mined. Scarcity getting scarcer...

How to become rich in the AI era:

- Research and map out which market verticals Claude will dismantle in the next 12–18 months.
- Identify the publicly traded companies in those industries pretending nothing’s wrong.
- Short their denial.
- Rotate capital to new markets.

Few are leveraging AI this way.

Everyone wants to bet on who adopts AI first. The asymmetric trade is betting on who won’t adopt it quickly.

And that gap will be brutally violent.

Price it in before the market does.

Lowest gas fees on Ethereum in over 3 years.

0.06 Gwei

Meanwhile, the $ETH supply is up 0.23% over the same timeframe.

Each dot is 3.2 million people. 2,500 dots = 8.1 billion humans.

the grey? 6.8 billion people who have never used AI.
the green? 1.3 billion free chatbot users.
the yellow? 15-35 million who pay for it.
the red? that tiny sliver is us.

You think the AI space is crowded because you're in an echo chamber of the 0.06%.

Next few weeks I'll share some really good AI stuff with you guys and I am excited to do so with you'll. 

I wrote about Variational back in October when it had $18B cumulative volume, $60M TVL and had refunded $1.33M to traders.

4 months later:
➤ Volume: $18B → $163.5B
➤ TVL: $60M → $107.6M
➤ Loss refunds: $1.33M → $4.2M
➤ OI is sitting at $705.6M (Ranked 6th across perpDEXs)

I got in early and kept farming this and the points are now at $25 each with $3.75M/week in distributions. The cheap accumulation window is gone.

The thing that made me farm it was the structure.

Zero fees, tight spreads, RFQ model with an internal liquidity provider and a loss refund system that actually works.

There's still time left until Q3 and I'm accumulating slowly.

$ONDO ' tokenized funds (USDY, OUSG) still do the heavy lifting. Stablecoins are growing steadily at +36% YoY.

But the number worth watching is somewhere else.

Tokenized stocks (still the smallest segment) grew over 3,000% YoY. That's roughly 14x faster than everything else in their product suite.

Small base, yes. But this is how category shifts start. The thing growing 14x faster than the core product usually isn't a side feature for long.

If tokenized stocks maintain even a fraction of this pace, they stop being a complement to the fund products and start becoming the reason institutions pay attention to Ondo.