$97.65M flowed to token holders last month across DeFi.

DefiLlama has a whole leaderboard for it. Hyperliquid, Tron, Aerodrome, Jupiter, all ranked side by side under "Holders Revenue."
But when you look at what each protocol is actually doing, the same label covers very different things.
Tron burned $26M in TRX last month. That means fewer tokens exist. That's it. Nobody received anything. You just hold and hope scarcity does the work over time.
Hyperliquid used $41M in fees to buy HYPE off the open market. Revenue goes in, tokens come out of circulation. At that scale it's hard to argue against.
But buybacks don't always work like that. Jupiter spent $2.29M buying back JUP last month and the token is still down 89% from its highs. While the protocol was buying, scheduled unlocks were putting more new tokens into the market than the buybacks were taking out. The money was real. It just wasn't enough.
Then you have protocols like Aerodrome that skip all of that and just send fees to your wallet. You lock veAERO, you get paid. $4.5M last month. dYdX and Convex work the same way.
Uniswap went from $0 in holder revenue for years to $3.73M last month cos they finally turned the fee switch on. For the longest time the protocol was generating fees but none of it reached holders. Now it does. Worth watching how that develops.
Three protocols on the same leaderboard. One burns tokens, one buys them back, one pays you directly.
The question that matters is simple. Does the money actually reach your wallet, or are you just hoping the chart goes up cos supply went down?