September delivered the strongest month of the year for onchain application revenue. Across the 356 chains tracked by DefiLlama, applications generated $467.66 million in revenue during the month, an increase of roughly 27% from the previous month and the highest monthly figure since October of last year — meaning every month in between had come in below that level.

Solana led all networks with $144.25 million, or about 31% of the total. Robinhood Chain followed in second at $84.39 million after a breakout month, with Hyperliquid ($60.56 million) and Ethereum ($55.43 million) taking third and fourth place. Binance Smart Chain completed the top five with $38.71 million. Combined, those five networks accounted for roughly 82% of the month's revenue, a measure of how concentrated app-revenue generation remains even across 356 tracked chains.

How App Revenue Is Measured

Every token swap or position opened on an onchain perpetuals platform carries a fee. A portion of that fee typically flows to liquidity providers, and depending on the application, some may be directed to lenders or token creators. The portion retained by the application after these payouts is counted as app revenue.

DefiLlama excludes several categories from its calculation, including stablecoin issuers, liquid staking protocols, and gas fees, which are paid to the underlying blockchain network and its validators rather than to the application itself.

The resulting figure serves as a fairly direct measure of demand. Applications only collect this revenue when people actually use them and pay to do so, making app revenue a useful gauge of what users are willing to spend on onchain products — something Total Value Locked (TVL) and wallet counts cannot capture.

Solana's Best Month Since January

Solana's $144.25 million total marks an eight-month high for the network and its strongest showing since January. The figure remains well short of January 2025, when applications on Solana generated roughly $650 million at the height of the memecoin frenzy. Both the 2025 peak and this year's rebound were powered by the same force — memecoin-linked trading activity.

Launchpads and memecoin trading did most of the work in September. StonkFun, a launchpad that went live in late July, sat at the center of the activity. The platform lets creators pair new tokens with tokenized stocks (blockchain-based representations of traditional equities), pre-IPO tokens, or other crypto assets in place of SOL. In early September, StonkFun moved its token launches onto Raydium's LaunchLab bonding curves, routing that new activity through one of Solana's largest trading venues. With that routing in place, Raydium's own monthly revenue will be one place to watch for whether the launchpad-driven activity carries into the fourth quarter.

Robinhood Chain Nearly Triples Monthly Revenue

Robinhood Chain — the network associated with the retail brokerage of the same name — posted the most surprising number on the board. Applications on the network brought in around $30 million in each of July and August, meaning September's $84.39 million came close to tripling the previous month's total and placed the chain ahead of both Hyperliquid and Ethereum. The one-month swing is also a reminder of how quickly the revenue leaderboard can reorder.

Hyperliquid, where most revenue comes from perpetual futures trading, finished just ahead of Ethereum. Ethereum still holds more value locked than any other chain by a wide margin, yet it ended September in fourth place on app revenue — a divergence between where capital sits and where users are actually paying to transact. Whether September's top-five ordering carries into the fourth quarter should become clear in DefiLlama's next monthly update.