Blockchain fees are payments users make to process transactions onchain and offer a more direct measure of value capture than volume alone. A chain can process significant transaction throughput while generating relatively little in fees.
Looking at last week's fee distribution across major chains, the rankings tell a different story than raw activity metrics might suggest.
Hyperliquid leads all chains with approximately 43% of the fee market share, generating around $11 million last week. Its fees are driven primarily by perpetuals trading activity, where users pay to open, maintain, and close leveraged positions.
The chain has grown its share considerably over the past year, reflecting the rapid migration of derivatives traders to its purpose-built infrastructure.
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Ethereum captures around 13% at approximately $3 million, derived from a broader mix of DeFi interactions, smart contract executions, and token transfers. Its fee compression post-Dencun is visible here relative to its historical dominance of this chart.
Solana registers approximately 10% at around $2 million, a notable gap versus its DEX volume share and a reminder that high-frequency, low-fee memecoin trading does not translate efficiently into fee revenue.
Bitcoin's share is comparatively small. With Ordinals and Runes activity having declined sharply from their 2024 peaks, the network has largely reverted to its base monetary transfer use case, which, at current activity levels, generates limited fee revenue relative to its market cap.
Fee market share is becoming an increasingly useful lens for evaluating which chains have durable, monetizable activity versus those running on speculative throughput. Hyperliquid's dominance is particularly notable given that it is a purpose-built application chain rather than a general-purpose Layer 1, suggesting that vertical specialization can be a more effective fee capture strategy than horizontal scale.