I defended this team for years. I've stopped. Carbon: $1.68M TVL, <$5K fees/30d

Community Chatroom (DISCUSSION)
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I’ve just done the math, which was generous, and then I looked at Carbon’s DefiLlama page. $1.68 million TVL, $1.7 million 30D volume, and $4,801.74 in fees generated (as of 09-21-2026); that’s about a 0.28% fee rate. This means that our TVL turns over about once per month, at best. Nine years in, this is pathetic.

Let’s look at Kyber. Or Uniswap. Or Sushi. Direct competitors.

  • Sushi (launched 2020): $106m TVL, $255m 30D volume
  • Uniswap (launched 2018): $3.807b TVL, $79.4b (WITH A “B”) 30D volume
  • Kyber (launched 2018): $1.23m TVL, ~$8.81b 30D aggregator volume (routed through third-party liquidity)
  • And just for giggles, Bancor (launched 2017): $27.72m TVL, $7.08m 30D volume (that is, TVL turns over approximately once every four months!)
  • Carbon, for completeness (launched 2023): $1.68m TVL, $1.7m 30D volume

Literally all of our competitors move more volume, and we had the head start. I know for a fact that at least one of our competitors (Sushi) got an early foothold right here on these very forums.

Carbon and Bancor are the same team, so here they are together: ~$8.8m in 30D volume. Sushi, the smallest of the competitors by volume, does ~29x that.

I have defended this team for years. I defended this project for years. And the only thing I have to show for it is loss. I closed my LP position–I noted that elsewhere–because while yes, things are technically getting better, effectively that capital was dead. I’d honestly rather take a haircut and get some capital back than let it sit there, useless to me, but feeding… whatever the hell has been going on for the past several years.

Technologically? Carbon is wonderful.

But how it’s been handled? Disgraceful. The name “Bancor” promised something the project never became, and then the promises the project explicitly made were also broken the second it got too hard; broken promises upon broken promises.

Each and every one of the team ought to be ashamed.

Everyone in this community keeps asking what the plan is, and no one has answered. So here is the simplest version of the question: is there a plan? If yes, publish it, with dates. If no, say so publicly.

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