Ethereum slowdown cuts dApp revenue as rivals, hacks rise

Ether has traded below $2,400 for three months while decentralized-exchange volume on Ethereum has fallen about 53% over the past six months and dApp revenue has declined roughly 49% over the same period.

Solana and trading platform Hyperliquid together account for about 42% of dApp revenue, a shift that comes as fewer new tokens were issued and memecoin activity cooled. Ethereum’s total value locked remains roughly six times larger than its nearest competitor.

Crypto-related exploits generated about $630 million in losses in April. Two incidents, KelpDAO and Drift Protocol, made up more than 80% of that total. Cybersecurity firm Hacken attributed the attacks to actors linked to North Korea. The KelpDAO exploit triggered roughly $13 billion in outflows from the Aave lending protocol within days and produced an estimated $177 million in bad debt before recovery steps were taken.

Lower fees and faster confirmations on rival chains have coincided with a shift of derivatives and high-frequency trading volume away from Ethereum. Solana and Hyperliquid have increased their share of revenue in segments where those performance factors matter most.

BitMine, the largest publicly traded corporate holder of Ether, bought its position for about $12.2 billion. The current value of that position is near $10.8 billion, leaving an unrealized loss of about $1.4 billion. The company holds 5.18 million ETH, roughly 4.12% of circulating supply, and has staked about 73% of that holding. Annualized staking revenue for the position is near $264 million. BitMine has not indicated any plans to sell. Tom Lee, chairman of BitMine, described Ether as being in the “final stages of the mini-crypto winter.”

Ethereum developers are preparing the Glamsterdam hard fork to add ePBS, a mechanism that lets block proposers outsource block building to an open market of builders. Vitalik Buterin wrote that the approach “ensures that block builder centralization does not creep into staking centralization.” Whether the upgrade will change where trading and revenue concentrate or accelerate use of layer-2 solutions remains uncertain.

Current on-chain metrics include falling DEX volumes, shrinking dApp revenue, large hack losses in April and concentrated revenue gains on competing chains. Market participants are monitoring those figures as network upgrades and security responses progress.