// learn
Every term, defined
The whole idea in one line: a chain is cheap when the market pays little for each $1 of fees it earns. Here’s the vocabulary.
FDV (fully diluted valuation)
The token price times the maximum token supply: what the whole network would be worth if every token that will ever exist were trading today. Chainfees uses FDV rather than market cap so that unlocks and future emissions are priced in.
Market cap
The token price times the circulating supply. Shown for context on chain pages; the ranking uses FDV. A chain with a market cap under $10M is too small to rank.
Network fees
What users pay the chain itself to get transactions included: gas, base and priority fees, and on rollups the fees users pay the L2. Fees charged by apps on the chain (DEX trading fees, lending interest) are not network fees. Source: DefiLlama chain-fee adapters.
Yearly (annualized) fees
Fees over the chosen window scaled to a year: window fees × 365 ÷ days with data. The default window is 90 days; 30, 180 and 365 are one tap away.
Revenue multiple (FDV/Fees)
FDV divided by yearly network fees: what the market pays for each $1 of fees a chain earns in a year. Lower is cheaper. It is the crypto cousin of a price-to-sales ratio, and the number Chainfees ranks by.
Median revenue multiple
The middle revenue multiple of every ranked chain: half the chains trade above it, half below. Chainfees uses it as the fair benchmark because one outlier can’t move it.
Fair price
The token price a chain would have at the median revenue multiple: price × (median multiple ÷ chain multiple). Above today’s price means the chain earns more fees than its valuation gives it credit for.
Undervalued rank
A chain’s position when every ranked chain is sorted by revenue multiple, lowest first. #1 is the chain the market charges least for its fees.
L1 and L2
A layer 1 runs its own consensus (Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin). A layer 2 settles to another chain, usually Ethereum (Base, Arbitrum). Both are ranked by the same yardstick; filter by L1 or L2 to compare within a group.
Transfer fee
The cost right now to send the chain’s native token from one wallet to another: gas estimate × gas price, plus the L1 data fee on rollups, read from public RPCs every hour.
Average transaction fee
Fees divided by transactions over the window, where daily transaction counts are available (growthepie). It covers every kind of transaction, so it runs higher than a plain transfer.