Curve Finance founder Michael Egorov said decentralised finance protocols can no longer rely on inflationary token emissions to drive growth and must instead generate sustainable revenue.
“Your yield should come from revenues, not from tokens,”
Egorov told Cointelegraph, adding that:
“Protocols cannot live without real revenues flowing.”
He said that if a token “is not doing something, maybe it’s better for you to not do token at all,” contrasting the current environment with the speculative “DeFi summer” of 2020 when triple-digit yields attracted liquidity.
According to DefiLlama, DeFi’s total value locked has fallen about 38% over the past six months, dropping from $158 billion in August 2025 to roughly $98 billion.
Egorov argued that users have re-evaluated risk and now require long-term technical safety rather than headline annual percentage rates, noting that:
“Right now, it’s absolutely impossible to rely on emissions to offset potential losses.”
He maintained that tokens are primarily tools for decentralisation rather than speculation, warning that without decentralised governance projects risk being treated as regulated financial services.
The debate over sustainable DeFi models has also been echoed by Marc Boiron and Vitalik Buterin, as shifting speculative flows and rising perpetual futures volumes force protocols to compete on revenue generation and capital efficiency instead of short-term yield incentives.