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Table of Contents
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Introduction
Hydrex Integral on Base has spent the measured period generating significantly more DefiLlama-tracked fees per dollar of locked capital than one of DeFi’s oldest and largest DEX protocols.
Curve DEX has more than $1.2B in TVL. Hydrex Integral, the Algebra-powered concentrated liquidity AMM running on Base, had $6.56M in TVL as of June 25, 2026. Curve is roughly 190 times larger by TVL. And yet, on a normalized fee-per-dollar-of-TVL basis across the measured nine-month period, Hydrex Integral generated over 13 times more DefiLlama-tracked fees per dollar deployed.
What Hydrex Integral Actually Is
Hydrex launched on Base in September 2025 as a MetaDEX and liquidity infrastructure protocol. It runs two core components: Hydrex Integral, the concentrated liquidity product built on Algebra Integral, and Hydrex Omni, the aggregation and routing layer designed to direct liquidity and incentives across the Base ecosystem.
As of June 25, 2026, Hydrex Integral held $6.56M in TVL, while Hydrex Omni held $1.86M. Integral accounted for nearly 78% of the combined total and is the focus of this analysis.
A methodological note is important here: DefiLlama’s Hydrex Integral fee metric includes multiple streams, including DEX fees, option exercise fees, Omni Liquidity fees, and external bribes. That means the cleanest framing is not “swap fees only,” but “DefiLlama-tracked fees per dollar of TVL.” Monthly and period-level aggregates are the most reliable basis for comparison.
The Headline Number
Normalized across the nine months from October 2025 through June 2026, Hydrex Integral generated $1,231 per day for every $1M of TVL deployed. Curve DEX generated $93. Fluid DEX generated $64. PancakeSwap Infinity generated $625.
Efficiency Gains across Hydrex, PancakeSwap, Curve & Fluid DEX
Source: DefiLlama · 9-month average Oct 2025–Jun 2026
That puts Hydrex Integral at roughly 13x Curve DEX, 19x Fluid DEX, and nearly 2x PancakeSwap Infinity on average daily fees per $1M of TVL.
Annualized, Hydrex Integral’s capital generated the equivalent of ~$449,000 in DefiLlama-tracked fees per $1M TVL, compared with ~$228,125 PancakeSwap Infinity, ~$34,000 for Curve DEX and ~$23,000 for Fluid DEX. The key point is not that Hydrex is larger in absolute terms. The point is that, during the measured period, each dollar of Hydrex Integral TVL generated substantially more tracked fee activity.
Six Dates, Six Data Points
Rather than summarizing the monthly trend abstractly, it is useful to look at six specific dates in the dataset. Each one shows a different part of the Hydrex Integral efficiency story.
Source: DefiLlama daily fee/TVL readings.
October 11 was the first major outlier in the dataset. Hydrex Integral recorded $82,943 in DefiLlama-tracked fees against $10.79M in TVL, producing a 0.769% daily fee/TVL reading. On the same date, Curve DEX recorded roughly 0.0081%, making Hydrex nearly 95 times more efficient on a fee-per-TVL basis.
November 4 was the highest daily reading in the measured period. Hydrex Integral recorded $183,938 in tracked fees against roughly $16.5M in TVL, producing a 1.117% daily fee/TVL ratio. Given Hydrex’s broader fee methodology, this should not be interpreted as ordinary single-day swap activity. It is better understood as a distribution-heavy snapshot where multiple tracked fee streams settled into the dataset.
November 11 showed that the efficiency advantage was not limited to one extreme spike. Even with a lower daily fee reading of $47,031, Hydrex Integral still generated 0.304% fee/TVL — roughly 35 times Curve’s daily ratio and materially above PancakeSwap Infinity’s 0.115% reading.
January 29 is the most important datapoint for context. Hydrex Integral reached its local TVL peak at $18.22M, while fee/TVL fell to 0.196%, the lowest of the selected snapshots. The gap versus Curve narrowed to 13 times, its tightest point in the table. This is the dilution problem in live form: when TVL grows faster than utilization, capital efficiency compresses.
March and May show the post-peak recalibration. TVL moved back toward the $6–7M range, while fee/TVL recovered into the 0.30–0.33% band. Hydrex became smaller than its January peak, but more productive per dollar of capital. That is the core pattern of the case study: lower TVL, higher utilization, stronger normalized fee output.
The Monthly Arc: Three Acts
Source: DefiLlama monthly fee/TVL, Hydrex Integral.
The nine-month period breaks into three simple phases.
First came the launch spike: October and November delivered unusually high monthly fee/TVL readings of 7.95% and 6.30%, supported by early protocol activity, incentives, and Hydrex’s broader DefiLlama fee methodology.
Then came compression. As TVL grew into January faster than fee generation, monthly fee/TVL fell to 1.86%, showing that more capital does not automatically mean higher capital efficiency.
Finally, the protocol recalibrated. After TVL moved back toward the $6–7M range, fee/TVL recovered into the 2.28–3.48% band, suggesting a stronger post-peak operating range.
Even at its weakest month, Hydrex Integral generated roughly 4x more tracked fees per dollar of TVL than Curve’s best month in the same period.
Why the gap exists: four structural reasons
The efficiency advantage is not a coincidence, and it is not just the revenue scope broadening from bribes and options. Four structural factors explain most of it.
Concentrated liquidity. Algebra's CLAMM concentrates LP capital in active price ranges. Curve's stableswap curves distribute liquidity more broadly, with large portions sitting well away from the current trading price at any given moment. A smaller TVL base in a CLAMM can support a higher fee/TVL ratio simply because a larger proportion of that capital is doing actual work at any given time.
Dynamic fee adjustment. Algebra Integral's fee module adjusts pool fee tiers to market conditions. Static-tier AMMs leave money on the table during high-volatility periods when traders are willing to pay more for execution certainty. Integral captures that additional value adaptively.
Revenue architecture. Hydrex runs a 95% revenue take-rate: virtually all swap fees flow to the protocol and token-holders rather than traditional LP yield. DefiLlama's adapter captures this full amount under its fee metric. Standard LP-sharing models distribute a large portion of fees to liquidity providers, which DefiLlama often accounts for separately. This structural design inflates Integral's reported fee number relative to protocols with different take-rate architectures.
Scale effects work in both directions. At $6M TVL, Integral's concentrated capital can maintain high utilization more easily than at $18M. January 2026 proved that the efficiency advantage compresses as TVL grows without matching trading volume growth.
Conclusion
The data is nine months old in one direction and open-ended in the other. What Hydrex Integral has proven so far is that the Algebra CLAMM engine, combined with an aggressive revenue capture design and ve(3,3) governance mechanics, can sustain meaningful fee efficiency at small TVL scale over a long period. The 2–3% monthly fee/TVL structural band that has emerged since February 2026 is real, and it is durable by any reasonable benchmark.
For Algebra, the Hydrex case adds a specific data point to the engine's track record: on Base, from September 2025 onward, a CLAMM deployment with ve(3,3) mechanics and dynamic fee management sustained a fee efficiency multiple over one of DeFi's largest and most established protocols, consistently, across nine months and multiple TVL regimes. The protocol's capital continued generating more revenue per dollar than Curve's capital even during Integral's own efficiency trough.
That is a useful result to have on record.
For teams looking to launch a decentralized exchange, Hydrex is a clear example that forking is not the only path. Algebra’s white-label DEX model provides production-ready DEX infrastructure, ready-to-use AMM code, concentrated liquidity, dynamic fees, and custom modules that help new DEXs improve capital efficiency and bring more efficient liquidity markets onchain.
Algebra Integral powers 100+ DEX deployments across EVM chains. Data sourced from DefiLlama. Third-party usage statistics per Dex Hunter, unverified against DefiLlama. Not financial advice.
