Went digging through @TermMax quarterly revenue and found the thing that usually hides behind the word "record".
Q3 2025: $186.94K, the protocol's best quarter ever. But look at the split. Liquidation fees $161.54K. Protocol fees $23.75K. So 86% of that record came from liquidations. The protocol earned the most in exactly the window when borrowers were doing worst.
Now compare Q1 2026. $58.7K total, of which protocol fees $46.11K and liquidations only $5.84K. On paper, three times worse. On revenue quality, much healthier — that money came from the market working normally, not from somebody's margin call.
The rest of the run: Q2 2026 $37.69K, Q3 2026 sitting at $20.51K so far. Cumulative fees since launch, $384K.
And here's the number I can't look away from. Annualized revenue of $312.7K against a 1B $TMX supply works out to about $0.0003 of revenue per token per year. Buying this on current cash flow makes no sense at all. What's actually on the table is a bet that fixed-rate lending grows alongside the rest of DeFi.
Honest about the limits of my own math: DefiLlama only counts what reaches the treasury. Alpha Market, with its 7% fee on premium and 1.9% take-profit fee on notional, may not be fully captured there. So the real figure could be higher. Not ten times higher.
The question I set myself and didn't close: should a fixed-maturity protocol grow linearly at all? Or is it lumpy by design — maturity to maturity, with flat stretches in between that look like stagnation but aren't?
#TermMax
Q3 2025: $186.94K, the protocol's best quarter ever. But look at the split. Liquidation fees $161.54K. Protocol fees $23.75K. So 86% of that record came from liquidations. The protocol earned the most in exactly the window when borrowers were doing worst.
Now compare Q1 2026. $58.7K total, of which protocol fees $46.11K and liquidations only $5.84K. On paper, three times worse. On revenue quality, much healthier — that money came from the market working normally, not from somebody's margin call.
The rest of the run: Q2 2026 $37.69K, Q3 2026 sitting at $20.51K so far. Cumulative fees since launch, $384K.
And here's the number I can't look away from. Annualized revenue of $312.7K against a 1B $TMX supply works out to about $0.0003 of revenue per token per year. Buying this on current cash flow makes no sense at all. What's actually on the table is a bet that fixed-rate lending grows alongside the rest of DeFi.
Honest about the limits of my own math: DefiLlama only counts what reaches the treasury. Alpha Market, with its 7% fee on premium and 1.9% take-profit fee on notional, may not be fully captured there. So the real figure could be higher. Not ten times higher.
The question I set myself and didn't close: should a fixed-maturity protocol grow linearly at all? Or is it lumpy by design — maturity to maturity, with flat stretches in between that look like stagnation but aren't?
#TermMax