Author: Castle Labs

Translator: Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Guide: The crypto industry has relied on vanity metrics such as TVL and trading volume to maintain its appearance, but now investors are starting to ask tough questions about real money: Where does your profit go? Maple uses income to repurchase tokens but does not clarify how the bought tokens are handled; Uniswap V4's fee cuts for LPs may drive away liquidity; Sky's complex accounting makes it impossible for token holders to understand their rights. When the protocol begins to discuss revenue distribution, the rules of the game change.

The crypto industry has long used on-chain activity metrics as the benchmark for success: TVL, trading volume, user numbers, transaction counts, and active addresses.

The more important question, which is rapidly gaining consensus this cycle, is: Are these businesses sustainable, can activities convert into actual revenue, and who can retain that revenue?

This week’s Chronicle focuses on:

• Maple's new rules-based repurchase
• Uniswap activating the fee switch for V4 pools
• Sky's strong revenue figures but complex accounts
• Theo's integration of Fidelity's FILQ into thBILL
• OndoPerps turning tokenized stocks into collateral

Revenue alone is not enough: it requires a clear path of value accumulation.

Will it flow to token holders, stakers, LPs, or reserves? Or will it be captured by other parts of the stack before holders can see it?

We will revisit a similar issue in this week’s Castle x Kaiko report: How does blockchain make money? What is becoming increasingly clear is that despite raising large amounts of capital and achieving lofty valuations, very few are operating sustainable, profitable businesses.

Maple's Revenue-Linked Repurchase

Maple has recently become a massive success story in the crypto space, offering professional management, licensing, and secure lending services for mature allocators. They have just completed a record-breaking first half, with AUM reaching $4.6 billion (an increase of 81% year-over-year), Q2 revenue of $4.4 million (up 47% year-over-year), even as DeFi lending contracted by 31%, their business grew by 22%.

Following that, Q3 has started strong with the launch of syrupUSDG, which is Maple's first new Syrup asset in two years. syrupUSDG takes Maple's on-chain credit engine to Global Dollar (USDG) and Robinhood Chain, providing holders access to lending strategies initiated by Maple.

syrupUSDG can be placed in Robinhood Earn, offering an annualized yield of up to 7%. This APY bundles Robinhood's distribution, Morpho's treasury infrastructure, Steakhouse Financial's curation, and Maple's institutional credit as revenue sources.

So how do SYRUP holders benefit from all this?

Recently, Maple implemented discretionary repurchases (MIP-019), but is now set to replace them with a rules-based framework (MIP-021). This will link the repurchase ratio directly to monthly total revenue:

• Below $1.5 million: 10% allocated to SYRUP repurchase
• $1.5 million to $2 million: 20% allocated to repurchase
• Above $2 million: 30% allocated to repurchase

Repurchases will occur at the end of the month after total revenue is finalized, with the purchased SYRUP allocated to the SYRUP Strategic Fund (SSF), which Maple defines as operational capital for strategic growth, token liquidity, capital reserves, and repurchases.

Most repurchases are aimed at distributing profits (dividends), canceling shares (destroying supply), or reducing circulation (locking supply). Maple’s approach doesn’t quite fit these models, making it more akin to a treasury management strategy.

This has been raised in forums, with community members requesting that purchased SYRUP be held in a public reserve address and considered non-circulating, non-voting, and non-transferable unless a new governance proposal is made. However, these safeguards do not seem to be included in the current proposal.

As a result, the definition and usage of this strategically recycled SYRUP remain unresolved, likely affecting public perception of this repurchase framework, leading it to be viewed more as a treasury management act rather than a true value accumulation for SYRUP holders.

We will pay attention to snapshot voting.

Uniswap Brings Fees to V4

Yesterday, Uniswap's Hayden shared that the protocol is now collecting over $5 million in fees daily, second only to USDT and USDC.

This revenue growth is largely driven by the launch of Robinhood Chain. However, while very popular, these statistics are neither annualized nor likely to last long. In fact, we expect Robinhood to internalize these fees as soon as possible.

In recent years, there has been considerable debate regarding the utility of UNI, its revenue, and fee distribution.

Ultimately, Uniswap has also activated protocol fees on V4.

Previous activations of the fee switch on V2/V3 prompted many LPs to shift to V4, incentivizing capital migration. How will this change affect LPs now? Will it enhance overall capital efficiency for Uniswap, helping to phase out V2 and V3 in favor of V4?

Due to its architecture, V4 requires a more flexible and customizable fee switch approach. This is primarily driven by the Hook architecture and dynamic fees, allowing for multiple fee tiers.

Consequently, governance rules in V4 will be defined by a "fee controller system", a practical approach ensuring governance can set rules for different "pool series" (V4FeePolicy), while still retaining enough flexibility to override or adjust these policies at any time (V4FeeAdapter).

The question remains: How will this change affect LPs?

Earlier fee switches on V2 and V3 led to LPs being cut by 25%, prompting their migration to V4.

With V4 fees now activated, can Uniswap retain LPs, or will they move to other fee-less trading venues?

Governance participants have expressed these concerns.

The proposed solution is to conditionally enable the fee switch for V4. That is, only enabling it when LPs are profitable.

One user proposed: "If a pool’s implied volatility remains above the actual volatility, governance can take a cut without harming LP trading.

Conversely, if RV > IV, then LPs are already undercompensated. Taking 25% of their fees won’t make the protocol profitable. It will push LPs further into negative expected value."

We will closely monitor the flow of funds in V4 to answer this question.

Fees in V4 will be allocated to LP rewards/repurchase distribution, with a split ratio close to 5-25% / 75%-95%. Here’s a comparison with Hyperliquid repurchases:

So far, Uniswap has burned over 6 million UNI tokens.

More statistics on UNI burn can be found here.

Another noteworthy aspect is the impact of these repurchases on the overall income and fees of token holders.

The way projects distribute these is very different.

Stay tuned, as we are writing a related report.

Sky Reports Record Revenue

June was a record month for Sky! In case you missed it:

• Record revenue run rate of $419 million
• USDS yield distribution exceeding $250 million
• Sky reserves continue to grow
• Increased activity in the Sky Agent Network

There is no doubt that Sky is generating revenue, developing new products, and driving more activity through Spark, Grove, and the broader Prime Agent structure.

But what do these record numbers mean for SKY holders?

SKY does have an accumulation mechanism. The protocol income from stable fees and Sky Agent performance is used to repurchase SKY in the open market, and these tokens are distributed to participants in the Sky staking engine. However, Sky is not a simple single-token, single-balance sheet story. Prime Agents have their own roles, tokens, holders, and economics. To provide context, Prime Agents are specialized capital allocators within the Sky ecosystem. Sky can fund or support them, they can owe money to Sky, and their performance can be incorporated into protocol profits. These profits should then support the SKY repurchase and staking reward mechanism.

This makes the question for token holders harder to answer clearly. You can look at protocol income, revenue costs, reserves, staking rewards, and token holder income. However, once Prime Agents are wrapped around the core protocol, the balance sheet becomes harder to read. Some value may accumulate to SKY. Some may remain with the agents. Some may flow through sUSDS or ecosystem rewards. Some may accumulate in SPK, GROVE, or future agent tokens.

PaperImperium wrote a helpful post this week exactly about this, arguing that Sky's financial position is hard to explain because Prime Agents are not consistently accounted for in the books. If determining what token holders are entitled to is too complicated, the value proposition itself may be weakened.

OndoPerps Launches, Using Tokenized Stocks as Collateral

Ondo has just launched OndoPerps, a perpetual contract product for trading stock perpetual contracts with leverage up to 20x.

This complements Ondo's spot stock products and allows it to compete with venues like Trade.xyz, which has captured most of the perpetual open contracts in RWA.

Listed markets include commodities like oil, gold, silver, as well as stocks from Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Netflix, Intel, AMD, Oracle, Micron, Palantir, SpaceX, Strategy, Coinbase, Circle, Robinhood, and indices like US100 and US500.

The uniqueness of this launch is that it complements Ondo's existing products by allowing tokenized stocks to serve as collateral for 24/7 perpetual exposure to commodities, stocks, or indices. This is a key differentiator from Hyperliquid and other trading platforms: unified margins across all products, supporting a broader range of strategies including hedging, delta-neutral, and more.

Now Ondo spot stock holders will be able to use these as collateral and hedge or leverage their current exposure.

The perpetual market still has a long way to go, and we can expect RWA perpetual trading to be one of the fastest-growing areas in the near future. The trend is clear.

On the backend, liquidity is ensured by a combination of institutional market makers and user traffic.

Tokenized Funds Shift from Issuance to Usability

Over the past two years, the RWA market has mainly measured progress through on-chain issuance.

One more fund tokenization, another asset management company on board, another blockchain supported.

The next phase is about the use cases for these assets.

This is why today we sit down with Theo to discuss their FILQ integration.

Theo invested $20 million into Fidelity International's tokenized dollar digital liquidity fund (FILQ) through Sygnum, making FILQ the second institutional base asset in their existing product thBILL.

While direct ownership is a familiar starting point for everyone, once the fund is on-chain, the more interesting question is where else it can go: inside stablecoin products, treasury products, collateral systems, lending markets, vaults, or settlement processes.

"Most investors don’t want money market funds; they want yield, and in a form they can actually use."

Theo's GTM and Chief of Staff Evan says: "Direct ownership of a fund only yields returns with nothing else. Packaging it as a composable product allows the same dollar to earn and remain liquid at the same time... Tokenized funds bring it to an institutional level, on-chain products make it useful."

thBILL had previously integrated Wellington's tokenized treasury fund. Now, with the addition of FILQ, Fidelity International becomes the second institutional manager. This broadens thBILL’s base and indicates that this structure can add new managers without having to rebuild the entire product each time.

If tokenized funds remain standalone wrappers, the market will only compete based on issuer brand, AUM, and supported chains. But if they become inputs to more customizable on-chain products, competition will shift to what additional value can be built around them.

Fidelity International's own articulation follows a similar line of thought. Emma Pecenicic, Head of Digital Asset Distribution at Fidelity International, states that the company views tokenization as a fundamental transformation in how global financial markets operate, combining investment expertise with digitally native infrastructure to bring regulated institutional-level on-chain liquidity to around-the-clock markets.

So what is this transformation that we are looking forward to?

Theo's perspective is: "Direct ownership is the first step because it is familiar to everyone. It corresponds to the way funds operate today. But the value of putting assets on-chain lies in what you can do with it next: use as collateral, bring in strategies, instant settlement."

The end target for these assets is clearly usability.

Can they be placed into treasury products? Can they support stablecoins? Can they be used as collateral? Can they circulate in lending markets, vaults, or structured products without causing compliance issues?

FILQ joining thBILL is a small but useful example of this transformation. The fund is not the end product; it’s a balance sheet project for Theo, reinforcing their product, setting the stage for growth, and expanding into areas that Fidelity finds hard to reach easily.

The next wave of adoption for tokenized funds will be driven less by direct holders of these institutional assets and more by embedded uses in on-chain products.

Dynamics We Are Watching

Circle and agent payments: Jeremy Allaire published an article about the Circle Agent Stack, pointing out that if agents take on more corporate work, the value will flow natively across programmable networks, and the agent economy and on-chain economy will start to overlap. What to watch is whether this will become real payment flows. Do agents really hold balances, pay service fees, rebalance wallets, settle bills, or trigger transactions in USDC? Will developers build around Circle's stack instead of general wallets and APIs?

Castle x Kaiko Revenue Report: Later this week, we will jointly publish a report with Kaiko on the changes in operating blockchain businesses. The chain has traditionally relied on block space fees, but is now forced to diversify into other vertical revenue streams, MEV, sequencer economics, application capture, and ensuring they can capture value where it truly accumulates.

Persistence of the Robinhood Chain: The Robinhood Chain made quite an impact in the on-chain landscape during its first week. We marked it as the fifth largest chain by 24-hour DEX trading volume shortly after its launch, with daily trading volume exceeding $370 million and cumulative trading volume of $1.35 billion, primarily driven by CASHCAT. It later rose to second place in 24-hour DEX trading volume, only behind Solana. While Robinhood has everything it takes to become a serious consumer distribution channel for on-chain finance, they are leaning toward the meme world, thus seeing great early indicators on-chain. We will observe how these two worlds find a better balance in the coming months.

SEC Roundtable on Public Market Access for IPOs: Clearly, cryptocurrency is making an impact on traditional financial markets, with multiple major exchanges opening their doors, an increasing number of assets being tokenized, and even IPOs coming on-chain. Now, the SEC is hosting a virtual roundtable on IPO modernization and expanding public market access.