# Crypto Fundamentals & Research

Protocol revenue, token unlocks, ETF flows and asset research — who publishes each definition, what is free to read and what pulling it by API costs.

*https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/fundamentals-research*

## What this category is

The accounts behind a token rather than the wallets moving it. What a protocol earns in fees and
keeps as revenue, how much of a token's supply is still locked and when it is released, what an
analyst wrote about an asset, and how much money moved into the spot crypto ETFs yesterday. The
buyer reads protocol revenue, token unlocks, [circulating supply](https://cryptomarkets.tools/glossary/circulating-supply)
against FDV, and ETF flows, and the comparisons they make look more like equity research than
like chain forensics.

That is the line against [on-chain analytics](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/onchain-analytics), and it runs through
the question asked, not through the data source. Glassnode and Nansen read the same chains as most
of the cards below. But a reader asking which wallets moved coins onto an exchange, or whom an
address belongs to, never needs a protocol's income statement. A reader modelling dilution from an
unlock schedule never needs smart-money labels. Neither reader shortlists across the line, which is
why the two categories were split on 8 October 2026.

Three of the ten cards, [Messari](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/messari), [CryptoRank](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/cryptorank-api) and
[SoSoValue](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/sosovalue), are also listed under
[market-data APIs](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/market-data-apis). A developer's list of data APIs legitimately
includes them, but the person who pays is an analyst.

## Four questions, four jobs

**What a protocol earns** is six of the ten cards. [Token Terminal](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/token-terminal) frames
it as an income statement, from fees through revenue to earnings and a price-to-sales multiple.
[Artemis](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/artemis) computes a fixed library of chain and protocol metrics the same way
everywhere. [DefiLlama](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/defillama) is the free default across 8,308 protocols, and
[Trading Strategy](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/trading-strategy) narrows the field to 5,440 DeFi vaults with net-of-fee
returns. [L2BEAT](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/l2beat) and [growthepie](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/growthepie) cover Ethereum's layer twos
only, the first asking what secures a chain and the second what the chain earns.

**What a token owes, and when** is [Tokenomist](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/tokenomist) and
[CryptoRank](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/cryptorank-api): unlock events, vesting schedules and, at CryptoRank, the
funding rounds that created them.

**What an analyst wrote** is [Messari](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/messari), which Blockworks acquired in June 2026. The
product, domain, terms and pricing page are still Messari's, so the card keeps that name. What
people renew it for is the research: diligence reports, a news feed from 500-plus sources, and
event monitoring that a human checks before it fires.

**Where fund money went** is [SoSoValue](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/sosovalue): daily net inflows, net assets and
premium for US and Hong Kong spot crypto ETFs.

## Free to read, priced to pull

All ten cards have a free tier, and on almost every one the free tier is a website. The price sits
on the API, and it is often a separate product rather than the next step up.

**Token Terminal** is free to read with full history, and Pro is $350 a month. The API is neither.
It is its own tier, quoted after a demo, and Pro does not include it. **Artemis** sells its
analyst seat at $100 a month, but the cheapest tier with API access is the $500-a-month spreadsheet
seat, and MCP and the Snowflake share sit at a tier the documentation starts at $50,000 a year.
**DefiLlama** goes the other way: the public REST endpoints need no key, and $300 a month buys
unlocks, active users, a documented rate limit and the MCP server.

The step is steeper for unlocks. Tokenomist's free plan has no API at all, and CryptoRank's free
Sandbox serves none of the fundraising or unlock data. **Messari** publishes one number, $4,500 a
year for an individual seat, and quotes everything else. Its pay-per-call route in USDC, with no
account, is the cheapest way to find out whether the data is what you need.

## Daily by nature

Nine of the ten cards record a latency that is not real time, and four say end-of-day outright:
Token Terminal, Artemis, Tokenomist and SoSoValue. Messari is the only one recorded as real time, and
its card says its Deep Research reports are refreshed weekly.

The lag is not a flaw. A protocol's revenue is an accounting figure, and accounting closes on a day.
Artemis returns the current day as null until it closes. Token Terminal's tables are daily, with
one hourly exception sold through its warehouse share. SoSoValue's site calls its data "real-time"
and then defines that as one update at the start of each ETF trading day, and the flow itself
settles a day later. **If the decision has to be made before the day closes, nothing on this page
will make it for you.**

## The words that move between vendors

**"Revenue"** is the share of user-paid fees a protocol keeps after paying lenders and liquidity
providers. Token Terminal and DefiLlama both define it that way and publish it. "Earnings" go
further, and Token Terminal warns that they may understate costs a project does not report
on-chain.

**"TVL"** is the word most likely to compare two different things. DefiLlama counts
deposits into a protocol's own contracts and excludes borrowed coins, the protocol's own token,
native staking and vesting tokens. L2BEAT's value secured counts every bridged or minted asset
whether used or not. The [TVL entry](https://cryptomarkets.tools/glossary/tvl) has the rest.

**"Active users"** is two numbers at Artemis, which publishes `CHAIN_DAU` and `DAU` as separate
metrics. L2BEAT counts user operations rather than transactions, so batching cannot inflate the
figure.

**"Open source"** means three things here. growthepie and L2BEAT are MIT-licensed and are the only
two cards flagged open source. DefiLlama's README aims at open source, but the adapter repositories
carry no LICENSE file. Trading Strategy's backtester is AGPL, but what you pay $199 for is the
dataset.

The cards that publish their definitions are the ones worth paying attention to: Token Terminal
per metric and per project, Artemis per metric with aggregation rules attached, DefiLlama in two
docs pages and inline per protocol, L2BEAT with the argument and the code. SoSoValue does not
document how it derives a flow, and Trading Strategy's risk grade is the vendor's judgement rather
than a disclosed model. [Where an on-chain number comes from](https://cryptomarkets.tools/guides/where-an-onchain-number-comes-from)
traces the four stages between a block and the figure on the page.

## Who pays for the free ones

The two open-source cards are funded by grants rather than subscriptions. That is not a discount.
It is a different incentive, and each card says what it is.

L2BEAT names Gitcoin, the Ethereum Foundation, private donors, investors and per-project grants
from the ecosystem it assesses. Its answer to that conflict is that every assessment is a file in a public repository,
and its terms reserve the right to shut the site down without notice. growthepie began on an
Ethereum Foundation grant, and its paying customers are the chains it measures. A chain on the top
listing tier gets default selection on metrics pages. DefiLlama is funded mainly by kickbacks from
the swap aggregators behind LlamaSwap, so it earns from the DEX volume it also reports. Trading
Strategy ranks vaults while running vaults of its own. None of this is hidden, and all of it is on
the cards.

## A calendar is not a metric

Tokenomist and CryptoRank's unlock data do not measure the past. They publish dates other people
announced, and a date can move. CryptoRank compiles its rounds and vesting records from
announcements and token documents, so a round that was never announced is not there. Tokenomist
labels every schedule with its source and its precision, from a vesting contract read to the second
down to its own inference by month. It also freezes privately sourced changes inside the 14 days
before a large unlock. The date on screen can therefore knowingly trail what the team has said in
private.

For the supply already out, [reconciling supply and market cap](https://cryptomarkets.tools/how-to/reconcile-supply-and-market-cap)
is the companion task.

## ETF flows are a derived number

No issuer publishes a daily flow. Issuers publish shares outstanding and NAV, each on its own
schedule, and an aggregator derives the flow from them after the close. SoSoValue's dashboard is
free, and so is its API key once an application is approved. The API, though, looks back only one
month, and today's row arrives with every flow field null. [CoinGlass](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/coinglass) serves
per-fund bitcoin ETF history from its cheapest paid plan, with shares outstanding and NAV, so a
flow can be recomputed rather than trusted.
[Getting spot bitcoin ETF flows as data](https://cryptomarkets.tools/how-to/get-spot-bitcoin-etf-flows-as-data) walks through
both routes.

## What to check before you commit

**Whether you may republish the number.** growthepie puts its data under CC BY 4.0 and allows
commercial use with credit. L2BEAT's terms say nothing either way. Tokenomist grants no commercial
licence on any self-serve plan, and SoSoValue's terms could not be read for its card. A
[redistribution](https://cryptomarkets.tools/glossary/redistribution) right is a separate purchase here too.

**Coverage per metric, not per platform.** On 19 September 2026 Token Terminal had fees for 323
projects and earnings for 233. On growthepie, every metric lists the chains it supports. A project on the site is not a
project in the metric you came for.

**Whether the API sees what the screen sees.** Tokenomist's paid web plans show all of history,
while its API returns one to three years back depending on plan. SoSoValue's API returns a month of a series its
website shows from launch.

**Whether a definition changed under the same field name.** In July 2026 Artemis changed what its
stablecoin transfer-volume fields measure without renaming them, and between May and June 2026 it
stopped computing 122 chains and protocols. A chart that crosses those dates is two measurements.

## What is not here

**Wallets and who owns them.** Exchange netflow, smart-money labels, holder maps and SQL over raw
chain data are [on-chain analytics](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/onchain-analytics), and that is where Glassnode,
Nansen and Dune live.

**Prices, order books and trades.** A spot price or a funding rate is
[market data](https://cryptomarkets.tools/categories/market-data-apis). Messari carries prices for 40,000 assets but no order
book or tape, and its own card says it does not replace a market-data API.

**Anything that tells you what to buy.** A P/S ratio is a valuation input, not a valuation, and an
unlock date is a schedule, not a prediction. Research that ends in a buy or a target is advice, and
advice is outside this catalogue.

## What this category looks like

Counted across the 10 cards below, not quoted from anyone.

- **Free tier:** 10 of 10
- **Cheapest paid month:** median $99.5, across $29 to $350 — from the 6 cards that publish a monthly price
- **Has a "call us" tier:** 8 of 10
- **Open source:** 2 of 10
- **Ships an MCP server:** 6 of 10

## Cards

- [Artemis](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/artemis.md) — Chain and protocol fundamentals — fees, revenue, users — one definition everywhere.
- [CryptoRank API](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/cryptorank-api.md) — Funding rounds, token unlocks, vesting and fund data as an API, plus coin prices.
- [DefiLlama](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/defillama.md) — DeFi's default metric set, with the TVL definition written down in public.
- [growthepie](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/growthepie.md) — Ethereum L2 economics, CC BY licensed, on an API with no key — and chains pay for depth.
- [L2BEAT](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/l2beat.md) — Ethereum L2 metrics with the risk assessment behind them, MIT-licensed and free.
- [Messari](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/messari.md) — Asset profiles, 500-source news and analyst-verified event monitoring, with an API.
- [SoSoValue](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/sosovalue.md) — Free spot crypto ETF flow dashboard, with a keyed API that only looks back one month.
- [Token Terminal](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/token-terminal.md) — Protocol fundamentals as an income statement — fees, revenue, earnings, multiples.
- [Tokenomist](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/tokenomist.md) — Token unlock calendars, vesting schedules and emissions, with an API from $99 a month.
- [Trading Strategy](https://cryptomarkets.tools/tools/trading-strategy.md) — Normalised DeFi vault returns, TVL and risk across 117 protocols, with an AGPL backtester.

## FAQ

### What is the difference between crypto fundamentals data and on-chain analytics?

The question asked. Fundamentals data answers what a protocol earns, what a token's supply will do and on what date, and where fund money went. On-chain analytics answers what particular wallets did and who they belong to. The two read the same chains, but a buyer of one rarely shortlists the other.

### Is there a free API for protocol revenue and TVL data?

Yes. DefiLlama's public endpoints answer without an account or a key, and growthepie's API needs no key either, though it covers only Ethereum and its layer twos. The other two big protocol-revenue sources charge for programmatic access. Token Terminal quotes its API by demo, and Artemis starts API access at a 500-dollar-a-month seat.

### Where can I get token unlock dates as an API?

Tokenomist includes 1,000 API calls a month on its 99-dollar Pro plan, and CryptoRank's unlock and vesting endpoints start at its 475-dollar Pro plan. Tokenomist's self-serve plans carry no commercial licence at all, so putting the dates in front of your own customers is an enterprise conversation.

### Why do two sites report different TVL for the same chain?

Because they measure different things on purpose. L2BEAT's value secured counts bridged and natively minted assets whether or not anyone uses them. DefiLlama's TVL counts only deposits into a protocol's own contracts and excludes borrowed coins, the protocol's own token and native staking. Neither number is an error. They answer different questions.

### Where do spot bitcoin ETF flow numbers come from?

Not from the issuers, who publish shares outstanding and NAV rather than a flow. An aggregator derives the daily flow from those figures after the close, and it settles a day later. That is why today's figure is provisional and why two sites can disagree until the next morning.