One of the largest DeFi projects and provider of decentralized lending and borrowing, Aave has seen explosive growth this summer. However, as several DeFi protocol tokens plateaued, Aave’s native token LEND followed the suit with a consistent downtrend shortly thereafter.
It has lost substantial chunks of value and was down by more than 43% since peaking in the last week of August. Just when it seemed like the bearish momentum was unstoppable, a significant uptick with respect to daily active address was noted.
This was revealed by blockchain analytic Santiment further went on to add,
“LEND is seeing a massive surge inactive addresses transacting on its network. Normally resting between 80-100 addresses per hour, 1:00 am PDT showed a max of 3,866. #Aave’s network still appears to be handling much higher network activity than usual.”
Interestingly, this coincided with Aave [LEND] token swap to AAVE on the cryptocurrency exchange Binance which further bolstered the address activity surge that took place in the first week of October.
This metric important primarily because prices normally tend to follow DAA count on a long-term time scale over a period of time. Hence, a massive spike, such as this one, with respect to the address count is often seen as a bullish outlook as demand for the network surges.
Notably, over the past week, Aave’s token was up by 3.31% and was being traded at $0.511, at the time of writing. With total value locked in [in terms of USD] stood at $1.154 billion, Aave was currently the third-largest DeFi protocol, according to DeFi Pulse.
Investors Flocks to Grab a Pie
The latest bullish sentiment could also be attributed to the latest funding round in which Aave secured a whopping $25 million from investors Blockchain Capital, Standard Crypto, and Blockchain.com Ventures. According to the platform, this capital would essentially be directed towards the growing Asian markets as well as bringing the still-nascent DeFi space closer to the institutional investors.
Aave’s success story is the reason because of its rising popularity. Its native LEND token posted 23% gains in the first quarter. As DeFi hype began to unravel, the token surged by an astonishing 400% in the next quarter. This was noted by the latest CoinGecko report which further revealed LEND was up by 304% in Q3 of this year and was also one of the best performing assets with YTD gains of more than 3177%.
