The blockchain industry is showing signs of newfound maturity – at least by one often-overlooked metric – pointing to broader adoption in decentralized finance, consumer applications and emerging sectors.
According to the novel one Onchain Revenue Report onchain revenues measured by fees paid by users are expected to reach $19.8 billion in 2025, following a record high of $9.7 billion in the first half of the year alone.
These fees represent the total amount spent by users transacting directly on the blockchain and related infrastructure, including but not circumscribed to transactions, swaps, registrations, gaming revenues and subscriptions.
While 2025 is not expected to exceed the record $24.1 billion set in 2021, total onchain fees have increased more than tenfold since 2020, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of approximately 60%.
“We believe that fees paid are the best indicator of the repeatable utility that users and companies are willing to pay for,” wrote the report’s authors Lasse Clausen, Christopher Heymann, Robert Koschig, Clare He and Johannes Säuberlich.
“As protocols mature and regulations improve, the ability to generate and distribute ongoing fee revenues will separate sustainable networks from early-stage experimentation,” they wrote.
Rising onchain fees not only signal financial health, but offer insight into broader adoption of blockchain technology, particularly in emerging areas such as real-world asset tokenization, decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), and wallet-based consumer applications.
The 1kx report argues that this growth underscores a structural shift: cryptocurrencies are evolving from speculative instruments into a legitimate, income-generating asset class with actual network effects.
Related: Bitcoin faces a fees crisis that threatens network security: can BTCfi facilitate?
Tokenized assets are gaining momentum
The report highlighted the rapid growth in the value of tokenized risk-weighted assets, which saw their value in the supply chain excluding stablecoins grow to over $28 billion by the third quarter of 2025. The figure has since surpassed $35 billion, according to data from RWA.xyz.
According to 1kx, the total value of tokenized assets on-chain has more than doubled over the past year, and the fees generated by these assets have grown even faster – a sign of growing user activity and market adoption.
Major Wall Street institutions including JPMorgan, BlackRock and BNY Mellon are making significant investments in asset tokenization. As Cointelegraph reports, JPMorgan tokenized one of its private equity funds on its private blockchain, Kinexys, while BNY Mellon partnered with RWA platform Securitize to bring collateralized loan obligations online.
Related: Tokenization platform tZero eyes 2026 IPO amid surge in cryptocurrency listings
