Zero to Crypto

September is closing out with these DeFi protocols as the top 10 revenue-generators for the month.

This bear market is very different btw. Okay, most charts look dead but usage is not dead at all. Some fundamentals are printing fees, liquidity still moves, and some tokens are somehow outperforming BTC. Those products have product-market fit and some version of demand that doesn’t need CT to be euphoric every morning. I’m seeing opportunities in perp DEXs, RWA and institutional credit, onchain TCG, privacy AI, and prediction markets. 1/ Perp DEX Very easy to understand, people don’t stop trading in a bear. They hedge, short, rotate, revenge trade, reduce risk, open basis trades, chase volatility, and somehow still find a way to pay fees. Crypto volume might go down, but this time degens already got oil, gold, and stocks to trade. – $3.7T volume YTD, $661B 30d – $14B OI – $HYPE making $366M fees this year People make money shorting alts, FOMOing into stocks, arbitraging funding, farming airdrops, or simply holding $HYPE. Projects capturing value: @HyperliquidX | $Hype, @Lighter_xyz | $Lit, @Aster_DEX | $Aster 2/ RWA and institutional onchain credit When risk appetite dies, people don’t stop wanting yield. They just stop wanting fake yield. Crypto is building its money market, credit desk, collateral layer, and yield curve at the same time for institutions. – stablecoin supply at $316B – tokenized RWA value around $31B ex-stables after growing from $6B in early 2025 – BlackRock BUIDL at $2.9B mcap People sell alts, but they don’t leave dollars. They park in dollars, borrow against dollars, settle in dollars, earn yield on dollars, and eventually deploy from dollars. Industry leaders: @OndoFinance | $Ondo, @maplefinance | $Syrup, @centrifuge | $CFG, @Morpho | $Morpho, @pendle_fi | $Pendle 3/ AI x privacy If agents are going to manage money, private data, enterprise workflows, wallets, medical info, trading strategies, or cross-chain execution, the public mempool is not enough. You can’t have an AI agent running a strategy while leaking its playbook every time it moves. – Near Intents is showing real use cases with $20.5B volume and 16.3M confidential TVL processed – Venice has 3M users and $50M annualized revenue Devs are staking $VVV for private access to 230+ AI models. NEAR is paying revenue to $NEAR stakers. Projects to watch: @AskVenice | $VVV, @NEARProtocol | $Near, @nockchain | $Nock, @dphnAI | $Pod 4/ TCG + Collectible-Fi Crypto usually sucks at making consumer products people actually want. TCG already has the demand. Crypto just fixes liquidity, custody, settlement, and global access. – weekly revenue hit $7.7M last week (ATH) – $57.4M gacha spending last week (ATH) Ppl can pull cards through gacha packs, redeem the physical card, sell back instantly at 85–90% of real-time indexed price, or trade the tokenized version. Collectors actually use: @Collector_Crypt | $Cards, @Courtyard_io, @phygitals 5/ Prediction markets When markets get weird, politics get weird, sports get weird, macro gets weird, everyone wants to bet on outcomes. This is another volatility market for degens with cleaner UX. – $137B volume executed in just H1 this year while all of last year did $63B – $1.2B OI – Polymarket doing $108M annualized fees Users open prediction markets to hedge, bet, and maybe farm a $POLY airdrop. Projects making numbers: @Polymarket, @Kalshi All of these don’t need bull market oxygen. They’re building businesses that breathe through the smoke.