How a verdict on this site is produced
There is no editorial judgement in any status label on this site. A script reads a fee series and applies fixed thresholds. Here they are in full, so you can disagree with them precisely.
The source
Every number comes from DefiLlama's fees dataset, read through api.llama.fi/summary/fees/{slug}. DefiLlama's adapters are open source, one file per protocol, and each protocol page links to the adapter that produced its number. Where an adapter watches a specific fee wallet, a protocol that moves its fees elsewhere will appear to fall to zero. We treat that case explicitly rather than calling it death.
We report fees, not volume and not revenue. Fees are the total paid by users of the product. That is the number that most directly tracks whether anyone is still trading through it.
The six statuses
Rules are evaluated in this order and the first match wins.
DefiLlama returns no usable series. We say we do not know instead of guessing.
Under $2,000 in fees over the last 30 days. Or under $10,000 while sitting more than 99% below its own peak 30-day window.
Down more than 25% against the previous 30 days. Shrinking right now, whatever the absolute size.
Up more than 25% on the prior 30 days, above $100K in the last 30 days, and above 10% of its own peak window, so a bounce off the ruins does not qualify.
Not shrinking, but below 15% of its own peak 30-day window. A working product with a fraction of the users it once had.
Everything else. Collecting meaningfully and matching no decline rule.
Why "dead" needs an absolute floor
The obvious rule is to call a bot dead once it falls some percentage below its peak. That rule is wrong, and it is wrong in the direction that makes this whole site untrustworthy. As of August 23, 2026, Photon sits 99.2% below its own best 30-day window and still collected $656K in fees over the last 30 days. Calling that dead to make a headline would be the same failure as quoting its peak number two years later, just pointed the other way.
So dead requires a small absolute number, not a large relative fall. Everything that has collapsed against its peak but still moves real money gets the Diminished label instead, and the page states both figures.
The peak comparison
Every page compares a bot against its own best 30-day window, computed by sliding a 30-day sum across the entire history DefiLlama holds. That is deliberately the harshest fair comparison available, and it is the number the stale listicles are implicitly quoting when they describe a bot at its height.
The cliff rule
If a bot's monthly fee take drops by more than 94% in a single month, from a base above $20,000, the page flags it and states plainly that we cannot distinguish a shutdown from a change in fee routing. Both produce an identical chart from outside. Guessing would be the easy thing and it would be wrong.
What these numbers are not
- They are not a measure of whether users of a bot make money. They measure what the bot collected. Most retail memecoin traders lose money, including the ones using the growing tools.
- They are not the fee you will pay. Check each product's own fee schedule.
- They are not a safety rating. A large bot can still be custodial, and a custodial bot can still lose your funds.
- They are not real-time. They are stamped with the UTC date they were pulled and regenerated on a schedule.
Conflicts of interest
Right now, no outbound link on this site is a referral link. The config that would hold them is empty. If that changes, every paying link gets marked ref on the page and declared here. The verdict classifier does not receive that config. It cannot see which protocols we earn from. That is the only way a page like this is worth reading.
Currently tracking 32 tools.
Questions
Where does the data come from?
DefiLlama's public fees API, specifically the per-protocol endpoint https://api.llama.fi/summary/fees/{slug}. It is free, it is open source, and each protocol's adapter code is public so you can read exactly which wallets are being counted.
What counts as dead?
A protocol is marked dead when its trailing 30-day fee take is under $2,000, or under $10,000 while more than 99% below its own best 30-day window. Dead deliberately requires a small absolute number rather than a large relative fall, because a tool can be 99% off a mania peak and still be a working business taking six figures a month. Those get labelled Diminished, not dead. All thresholds are in the generator's source, not in a human's head.
Do referral relationships change a verdict?
No. The classifier runs on the fee series and does not know which protocols we have a referral relationship with. If a bot we would earn from is collapsing, its page says it is collapsing.
Why not use volume instead of fees?
Volume is easier to inflate. Fees are a payment that actually leaves a user's wallet and lands somewhere on-chain, which makes them the harder number to fake. They are also what DefiLlama's adapters measure most consistently across this category.