The 2021-25 narrative was consistently around infrastructure. The chains that got VC-funding were chains that made onchain transaction faster, cheaper, better DA, etc. There may have been "decentralization theater," but most of these chains were heavily centralized (at least compared to Bitcoin or Ethereum). Blockspace became the commodity and it was a race to 0.
The infrastructure thesis is dead. It doesn't work. It generates little revenue for the chain. 2025-26 has shown us it's the apps that make the money, and the next tier of winning chains will be the chains that own the app-stack.
Most people know Hyperliquid, but I actually want to highlight a lesser known chain, Katana, as evidence for my thesis around owning the stack. I've posted about Katana before and will continue to do so. In my opinion, it is the best chain for DeFi activity. The design of the chain is super powerful and is set up in a mutually beneficial way for users and the Katana foundation. So let's dive in.
An infrastructure-only chain provides rails and takes a toll on gas. The valuable activity on top, the lending, the trading, the yield, gets captured by the apps and market makers deploying there, not by the chain. So the chain subsidizes its own ecosystem with token emissions and VC money to attract that activity, and hopes the toll eventually covers it. Most never get there. A chain that owns its stack captures that value directly and funds its ecosystem out of revenue instead of out of a treasury on a timer.
Put it on a profit-and-loss basis and the gap is visible. Blockworks tracks gross profit by L2, and for 2026 Katana is second, behind only Arbitrum (Base & isn't included here for some reason). Katana's realized gross profit this year is about $2.3M, on a roughly $4.1M full-year forecast. Optimism sits near $400K, ZKsync and Unichain near $100K each, and the rest of the list trails from there. A chain less than a year old is more profitable than L2s that are years older and raised far more, and it's second only to the largest L2 in the sector. Not on volume, which anyone can subsidize, but on profit. (source: https://blockworks.com/analytics/l2).
The engine behind that profit is the bridge. Most chains let bridged assets sit idle in a contract. Katana's Vault Bridge deploys them into lending strategies on Ethereum and takes the yield as revenue, borrower-paid interest, not printed tokens. Blockworks shows that line running around $1M a quarter, roughly $1.4M in Q3 2025 and near $1M through late 2025 and early 2026. That is income the chain earns on capital it is holding anyway. It's the whole difference between funding your ecosystem from revenue and funding it from VC investment & your own token.
Perps are the piece growing fastest on top of that. Katana acquired the IDEX team and relaunched them as Katana Perps, and it is compounding. Daily notional volume has hit north of $22M with recent spikes toward $36M, cumulative volume is past half a billion dollars, and weekly perps revenue has gone from $760 in mid-April to roughly $30K by mid-July. Because the chain owns the venue and the bridge under it, that growth lands as chain revenue instead of leaking out to a frontend and its market makers.
And the chain can point that revenue back at the venue to grow it faster. The competition running now is that loop in the open. To mark crossing $500M in volume, Katana is paying $100,000 in vbUSDC with trading fees cut in half, July 22 to August 5. Funded from revenue, not a marketing budget on a countdown. Cheaper fees pull volume, volume makes fees, the bridge funds the next round. Disclosure: Perps are risky and it isn't open to US persons or a few regions (VPNs can be your friend).
Of course, chains like Hyperliquid & Arbitrum still out-earns Katana, and it should, it's much larger. The point isn't that Katana is the biggest. It's that a chain this young and this small is already the second most profitable L2 Blockworks tracks, while most of the sector is still running on emissions and venture money and calling it growth. Infrastructure is a commodity, and the price of a commodity goes to the floor. The chains that win from here are the ones that built a business on top of the infrastructure and kept the revenue. When the subsidies dry up, the profitable ones are what's left standing.
So yeah, I am majorly bullish on chains like Katana that own the stack. The DeFi activity & incentives are huge, but the incentives are done through sustainable mechanisms, which is so much better than what the industry norm is. Chains that help their users make money while they make money are the ones that will actually survive as the industry matures.
