The last cycle taught DeFi protocol builders a hard lesson: incentive emissions pump charts, then drain treasuries and trust. Total value locked still appears large on dashboards, but headline TVL near the $150 billion mark masks fragile retention and cyclical outflows as farmers chase higher APRs elsewhere. The result is a growth engine that sputters whenever token rewards thin out.
Industry leaders have warned about this loop for years. The well-worn playbook includes shipping a token, spraying incentives to boost TVL, celebrating the spike and then watching capital rotate away. It creates surface-level momentum without durable value. The model invites mercenary liquidity and leaves communities with overhangs and weak fundamentals.
Sustainable yield comes from services that people actually use and pay for: blockspace, liquidity provision, security, compute and data access. Fees tied to real utility are modest, but they scale with usage and they compound. The question DeFi has wrestled with is where to find more of these “real economy” revenue streams that don’t rely on continual token issuance.
Our incentive model has pre-existing revenue starting from day0 mainnet launch. We don't just rely on inflationary emissions.
— ars (@arsydefi) October 11, 2025
Neura’s economic model is built around real usage based revenues that are captured at the protocol level and recycled into liquidity, rewards, & long… pic.twitter.com/XIolcOLhGW
Infrastructure is the missing yield engine
Every onchain action begins before a transaction hits a mempool. Wallets and apps read state, fetch balances, query logs, estimate gas and call methods thousands of times per second across the ecosystem. Those remote procedure calls (RPCs) are the unseen API of Web3, and they’re essential for everything from wallets to rollups. Historically, the bills for those requests live offchain as invoices to node providers and are paid in fiat.
The scale is enormous. Ankr, a Web3-native infrastructure provider, processes over 1 trillion monthly RPC requests across 90 blockchains, showing that the data plane of crypto is where the vast majority of user interactions actually happen. Yet almost none of that spend circulates back onchain to deepen liquidity or reward the apps generating the load.
That gap suggests a simple idea: if gas fees can enrich networks onchain, why can’t RPC spend do the same? Turning infrastructure costs into chain-owned liquidity would convert a perpetual expense into a compounding asset — an always-on, usage-indexed source of yield.
Turning calls into capital with RPCfi
RPCfi is a new primitive offered by Neura, an EVM-compatible layer-1 blockchain purpose-built for stablecoins, DeFi and real-time digital finance. It captures RPC spend at the infrastructure layer and cycles it into onchain liquidity and rewards. Where traditional setups let value leak to offchain bills, RPCfi reroutes a share of that demand toward liquidity provisioning and points or rewards programs to create an engine that scales with usage.
“If gas fees reward computation and staking rewards security, RPCfi rewards the very pulse of Web3 — data access, said Neura CEO Arsalan Evini. “It’s the mirror image of gas yield, transforming offchain RPC costs into onchain liquidity and tapping into a new pool of DeFi yield.”
This approach arrives alongside a broader push to align base-layer economics with real activity. RPCfi sits within a broader toolkit that pairs deterministic, high-throughput infrastructure with demand-based revenue streams, so builders, validators and users compound together as usage grows.
The solution in practice
Here’s how RPCfi works in practice:
A decentralized application (DApp) spends $10,000 per month on Ankr’s Premium RPC services on BNB Chain.
Under the new RPCfi model, 50% of that spend ($5,000) is automatically captured and redirected onchain.
The first step in this is bridging the USD value to the Neura blockchain.
That $5,000 is then used to buy equal portions of BNB (BNB) and ANKR ($2,500 each).
The resulting assets are then deposited into a liquidity pool via Zotto, Neura’s flagship veDEX/AMM.
The rewards generated by that liquidity position, including emissions and RPCfi points, go directly back to the originating DApp.
The DApp can then choose how to use those rewards: distribute them to holders, reward stakers, or reinvest them.
This model goes live at the mainnet launch, integrated natively with Ankr’s existing infrastructure business.
Teams can map their existing RPC line items to a recurring liquidity strategy, treating infrastructure as a budget line that earns. Chain-owned LPs reduce reliance on mercenary capital, stabilize markets with tighter spreads and unlock new incentives for sticky users. As traffic scales, the liquidity base grows with it, forming an organic moat rooted in usage rather than emissions.
Why this finally works
Historically, node providers behaved like Web2 SaaS with offchain billing, fiat payments and no onchain recapture.
Ankr aims to change that. As a Web3-native RPC provider, it can uniquely redirect RPC value flows back into blockchain economics.
This partnership between Neura and Ankr closes the loop. RPC costs that once drained out of the ecosystem are now recycled as onchain liquidity and rewards, reinforcing the very networks that generate them.
New era for real-time finance
Neura was designed to power the next generation of real-time global finance — fast, cheap and stable. But with RPCfi, it also introduces something deeper: a built-in, infrastructure-native yield mechanism that ties every transaction, every query and every DApp interaction directly into the value of the network.
DeFi’s next chapter favors yield that scales with real activity and revenue. By converting the internet backstage of crypto — every balance lookup, log query and contract call — into onchain liquidity, Neura’s RPCfi offers a path to resilient rewards and durable network effects. It turns a hidden cost center into the backbone of a healthier DeFi economy.
Find out more about Neura and Ankr
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