Spark, August 2026: Deposits up 10.9%, Net Revenue down 26.0%, Liquidity Layer spread at 6 bps

Independent review of the Spark family (SparkLend, Liquidity Layer, Savings) for the month of August 2026. Fee, revenue, spread and allocation figures come from Spark’s own published financials at data.spark.finance; deposits, peers and prices from DefiLlama; collateral composition from on-chain reserve data. Methodology and named gaps are at the end. Summary Family gross deposits averaged $7.01B, up 10.9% on July, still 22.6% below a year ago. SparkLend grew 10.7%, third of ten major lenders against a sector median of 7.0%. Every major lender grew. Most of the dollar growth is collateral repricing. ETH rose 31.1% and wstETH 31.5% in the month; 75.8% of SparkLend supply is ETH or BTC linked. Capital efficiency reads 46.3%, down 2.8 points, but rose 1.6 points at constant prices. Family net revenue fell 26.0% to $1.24M while gross yield fell 4.1%. The Liquidity Layer’s take rate halved from 6.7% to 3.8%. It earned $8.02M, paid $7.72M in funding cost, and kept $301,520. The Liquidity Layer’s cost of capital rose 12 bps while its asset yield fell 28 bps. The spread closed the month at 0.060%. Distribution Rewards from Sky were $843,505, or 68% of family net revenue, and fell 19.0% month on month. Net of them, Spark’s products kept $400,255. 47.4% of the Liquidity Layer’s $2.29B allocated book sits in SparkLend; 48.8% funds Spark’s own products. Deposits Measured on the same gross basis across the ten largest lending protocols, every one grew in August. The sector median was +7.0% and aggregate deposits rose +11.3%. SparkLend at +10.7% ranked third, behind Morpho Blue (+15.5%) and Aave V3 (+12.6%). Spark’s own recap reports WBTC supply passing 3,000 units on 1 August and wstETH supply passing $3B on 21 August; both are consistent with reserve data. Asset 1 Aug 31 Aug Change wstETH $2,311 $3,039 +31.5% ETH $1,865 $2,445 +31.1% BTC $63,013 $78,282 +24.2% Deposits are counted in dollars and held as tokens. With 75.8% of SparkLend’s $6.45B supply ETH or BTC linked, a 10.7% rise in dollar deposits is a smaller move in token terms than it appears. The same effect explains the fall in capital efficiency: active loans over net deposits reads 46.3% at month end against 49.1% at the start, but holding end-of-month quantities at start-of-month prices the measure rises 1.6 points. The reported decline is a denominator effect. As a check on the reserve data: $6.45B supplied minus $2.02B borrowed leaves $4.42B, and Spark itself published $4.4B of SparkLend TVL for the same date. The two agree. Revenue July August Change Family gross yield $9.34M $8.96M -4.1% Family net revenue $1.68M $1.24M -26.0% Liquidity Layer net $546,266 $301,520 -44.8% Liquidity Layer take rate 6.7% 3.8% -2.9pp Spark earned almost as much as in July (gross yield down 4.1%) but kept far less of it (net down 26.0%). The difference is what it cost Spark to fund that capital. The volume of business barely changed; the margin on it did. The Liquidity Layer produces 89.5% of the family’s reported gross yield and contributed 24% of net (see the note on that 89.5% in the gaps below). Liquidity Layer spread 1 Aug 31 Aug Asset yield 4.080% 3.797% Cost of capital 3.618% 3.737% Spread 0.462% 0.060% The spread averaged 0.560% over the first half of August and 0.266% over the second. At a 0.060% spread on $2.72B of total assets, the Liquidity Layer would earn about $1.6M a year. That is the scale of the business at month-end. A caution on net figures: net revenue is what is left after subtracting $7.72M of funding cost from $8.02M of yield. Being 1% out on either number moves the $301,520 remainder by roughly 27%. Treat net as a range, not a point. Net revenue by product Product Net, August Share of family net Distribution Rewards $843,505 68% Liquidity Layer $301,520 24% SparkLend $96,404 8% Curation Fees $2,331 0% Distribution Rewards are a payment from Sky under the Agent Framework, accrued on USDS balances Spark refers and settled monthly. They are not product earnings. Over fourteen months, family net revenue has fallen from $3.20M (July 2025) to $1.24M, a 61% decline, while the Distribution Rewards share of net moved from 23% to 68%. The Liquidity Layer ran negative in April, May and June 2026 before recovering. Liquidity Layer allocation Venue Share USD SparkLend 47.4% $1.09B Morpho 14.0% $321.4M Ripple RLUSD 11.0% $251.7M PayPal PYUSD 10.4% $239.1M Anchorage 9.2% $210.0M Uniswap V4 6.6% $150.1M Spark Prime 0.9% $20.3M PSM3 0.5% $11.5M 48.8% of the $2.29B allocated book is redeployed into Spark’s own products, 51.2% external. This overlap is why the family total ($7.76B) is smaller than the sum of the three products ($9.58B): $1.82B, or 23.5%, is counted twice. Roughly half the allocator’s book funds a lending market whose own net take was $96,404 for the month, while the funding cost on that capital is charged in full. Note on DefiLlama’s Liquidity Layer revenue data This report does not use DefiLlama’s fee and revenue series for the Liquidity Layer. That adapter reads a Dune table published by Spark one day at a time and stores whatever it finds. Against the source it captured 100% to 102% of reported gross yield every month through April 2026, then 79.9% in May, 72.6% in June, 66.9% in July and 67.9% in August. Three July days match Spark’s records to the dollar while seventeen are short by more than $100,000, and the served series swings 51.6% day over day where the source moves 4.5%. Netting a full month of funding cost against a partial month of yield produces a reported -$649,334 for August where Spark’s accounting shows +$301,520. The defect has been reported to DefiLlama. It affects the fee adapter only, not the TVL feed used here for deposits. Delegates citing Liquidity Layer revenue from DefiLlama for May onward should be aware of this. Methodology and named gaps Net revenue is not a precise figure. At 3.8% of gross it is the small remainder of two large numbers. Blockworks Research agrees with Spark on gross yield and Distribution Rewards to within 1% but books a 2% to 6% lower funding cost, enough to change the sign of net in some quarters. Quote gross yield, funding cost and spread; treat net as a range. Distribution Rewards may be revised. They settle as a monthly off-chain rebate. Spark’s figures matched Blockworks to within 1% on every settled quarter but ran materially below for July and August as of 1 September. Savings TVL is not reconciled. Spark’s recap reports $4.9B; its vault endpoint sums to $3.37B; DefiLlama reports $1.21B. No Savings figure is used in headline claims. The Liquidity Layer allocation table is a snapshot taken on 31 August. Capital moves within the month, so the mix on other days may have differed. Spark publishes Liquidity Layer revenue monthly, not daily. The first-half versus second-half split of earnings is derived from the daily yield and cost-of-capital series, not reported by Spark. The 89.5% gross yield share is measured after SparkLend’s supplier interest. Spark reports gross yield as what accrues to Spark. SparkLend’s line is already net of interest paid to its suppliers, which never belonged to Spark, so 89.5% is the Liquidity Layer’s share of what reaches Spark, not of the total activity the family intermediates. Spark publishes three Liquidity Layer totals: allocated assets $2.29B, assets $2.64B, total assets $2.72B. Allocated assets are used throughout except for the spread, which is calculated on total assets as Spark publishes it. Sources: DefiLlama (defillama.com/protocol/spark); Spark Data Hub, operated by Block Analitica (data.spark.finance); Spark August 2026 recap ( Spark (@sparkfinance) / X ); DefiLlama dimension-adapters, fees/spark-liquidity-layer; Blockworks Research ( Spark: Overview - Analytics Dashboard - Blockworks ); Spark documentation (docs.spark.fi). If any figure here disagrees with your own records, please say so in the thread and I will check it against the source. Working behind any number is available on request. 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic