Papertrade's 7-Day Protocol Revenue Slips to $8.5 Million, Fifth Rank Intact

Inside the $8.5 Million Count

Papertrade's seven-day protocol revenue came in at $8.5 million as of Oct. 25, and the venue kept its fifth-place seat even as the number itself moved lower. The new snapshot sits $4.88 million below the $13.38 million window recorded on Oct. 23, yet the rank did not budge: DefiLlama's fee leaderboard showed the same fifth position in both readings, with Tether, Circle, Pump.fun and Hyperliquid ahead of it. That pairing, a falling figure and a stable seat, points to how thin the field beneath the top four has become, but the mechanics behind the number deserve the closer look. Stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle earn from reserve yield, a base Papertrade cannot replicate; its revenue has to come from trading outcomes alone. The tally is not a trading-fee line in the ordinary sense. DefiLlama builds it from three streams: 2% of the profit a trader books when a position closes, 2% of the margin a trader surrenders in a liquidation, and everything deposited beyond the liquidity pool's $5 million cap, which is routed to PAPER token stakers rather than left in the trading float. Profit that stays inside the pool after a trade settles is excluded from the count entirely. Papertrade runs synthetic perpetual futures on Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) on HyperEVM, a dapp where traders take positions against the protocol's own pool instead of an order book of opposing users. Because traders face the pool rather than each other, the fee count captures realized outcomes, closes and liquidations, rather than raw turnover. The structure makes the pool itself the house, which is why overflow past the cap converts directly into protocol income. For an altcoin trading venue to sit fifth against two stablecoin issuers and a derivatives exchange is an unusual placement on a leaderboard usually led by pegged-asset issuers.

The dominant line inside the $8.5 million is the staker distribution. Of the window's total, $7.59 million counts as holder revenue routed to PAPER stakers, meaning close to nine of every ten dollars the protocol booked reached token holders rather than a treasury or a team fee address. DefiLlama assembles that line from two sources: half of the position-closing and liquidation fees the venue charges, plus the full amount deposited past the liquidity pool's $5 million ceiling. The remaining half of the fees is credited to the development fee recipient. The ceiling matters as much as the percentages do. Deposits within the $5 million cap stay in the pool as trading float, the capital traders actually bet against, and only the excess is swept out as protocol income. A pool-side counterparty also concentrates outcomes differently from an order-matched venue: when traders win, the pool pays; when they lose or are liquidated, the pool keeps the margin, and the protocol's percentage comes off the top either way. On a heavy week that overflow runs large; on a quieter one it thins, one reason the seven-day figure can swing by millions between snapshots. The two readings now on record, $13.38 million in the window captured on Oct. 23 and $8.5 million in the one dated Oct. 25, are rolling sums over different seven-day stretches rather than a revision of one number, and both landed in fifth place. Our earlier report on Papertrade's $13.38 million week described the same stability at that point in the table. The split also keeps staker payouts flowing whenever closes and liquidations occur, even in a window with thinner overflow. What moved between the snapshots is the flow through the fee engine, not the venue's position in it, and the position is what a leaderboard reader actually sees.

A Sparse Tier Beneath the Top Four

The $4.88 million drop between windows cost Papertrade no rank at all, which reads as evidence that the tier beneath Tether, Circle, Pump.fun and Hyperliquid is sparse: a venue can shed more than a third of its weekly revenue and still sit fifth. Momentum is not concentrating in one chain either. The Sui ecosystem drew its own institutional flows this quarter, with Sui ETF inflows reaching 14 million SUI across five straight weeks, a separate story from a HyperEVM fee engine whose income moves with trading activity. The steadier fact in this snapshot is distribution: $7.59 million of the $8.5 million still reached PAPER stakers, the share of the business the week left unchanged.