Coins powering major decentralized finance [DeFi] protocols saw some strongest gains as the market hinted at a recovery earlier this week. This, in turn, prompted the total value locked [TVL] in DeFi to touch an all-time high of nearly $30 billion. on the 27th of January.
However, as Bitcoin’s price briefly slid below the support line of $30k on late Wednesday, DeFi’s TVL figures has since cooled off as it fell back below $24 billion.
DeFi Coins Caught In Hot Price Action
As for the DeFi coins’ value, except for Wrapped Bitcoin [WBTC], other top tokens have had a prolific week amassing double-digit gains.
Over the last 7-days, leading DEX Uniswap’s UNI token has recorded the most gains of nearly 80% and was valued at $14.17. TWJ had earlier reported that the protocol’s native token saw a ballistic rise in its price this bull run and emerged as one of the best-performing digital tokens in the world.
Open-source non-custodial platform Aave’s native token has also been on a bull run for the past several weeks and was priced at $279.02, at the time of writing. Its price made a run for $290 before losing steam. Despite the retracement, Aave noted a 7-day gains of 61.38%.
Compound’s governance token, COMP was the third-best performing token this week amassing gains of 23.77% over the same period of time.
DeFi Trends
According to a recent report by the blockchain company ConsenSys revealed that “the breadth of invention and adoption of DeFi kept pace in Q4 of 2020″ even as ” DeFi summer cooled off”.
There was certainly the rise of decentralized exchanges or DEXs in the last quarter of the year. The report stated that the total trade volume on DEXs in Q4 crossed a whopping $60 billion, and one of the main drivers of this activity is because Wrapped Ethereum [WETH] made it simple to swap ETH for any other ERC-20 token.
The last quarter also witnessed an increased demand from institutions and
other blockchain-based protocols to access the liquidity and economic activity on Ethereum. This can be attributed to the fact that despite its scalability issues Ethereum has managed to attract and accommodate digital assets from other blockchain protocols.
Undoubtedly, the appeal of DeFi has grown substantially despite Bitcoin’s price grabbing mainstream headlines. Many industry players are keen that the ecosystem’s adoption and utility permeating will be the main trends throughout 2021.