Are protocol fees sustainable in the long term?

The article examines whether the Fat Protocol Thesis, which Joel Monegro wrote in 2016 and which holds that a protocol's value will exceed the combined value of the applications built on it, holds up, and argues that protocol fees are not reliably sustainable. It says applications often earn more fees than protocols: Uniswap and OpenSea have made nearly $2.8 billion because of high monetary velocity and enforceable take rates. The author notes that Compound has over 212k individuals holding its tokens outside an exchange, while about 2k used it for a loan in the last month. It also argues that raising take rates on protocols can break network effects unless the use case justifies the cost.