Decentralized finance, also known as DeFi, hit $30 billion in value locked over this January weekend, showing growth of over 58% over the past month.
2021 started off quite strongly for the DeFi, the decentralized sector of the digital industry. To date, the total value stored, or TVL, that exists in DeFi exceeds $30 billion, according to data shown by data provider DappRadar. Despite suffering some drops during the month, the growth of liquidity deposited within this sector has been sustained. In January, DeFi started with just over $19 billion in TVL, closing the month with a total of 30,7 one billion dollars, at the time of this publication.
Source: DappRadar
The decentralized protocol that once again rules in DeFi is MakerDAO, whose capitalization exceeds 4.840 million, again displacing Uniswap.
Despite this, the growing interest of investors in DeFi is mainly attributed to the increase in value of Ethereum (ETH) this month, which reached a new all-time high, surpassing the one seen in January 2018, 3 years ago. In addition, it is also attributed to the milestones that the Uniswap and Aave, whose governance tokens reached new all-time highs (ATH) already Compound, whose token also grew exponentially this month. Uniswap and Aave tokens marked new ATHs during this weekend.
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Uniswap, Aave and Compound attract investors to DeFi
The number of active traders on Uniswap grew from the previous week. As of this writing, the decentralized exchange protocol (DEX) Uniswap has over 121.500 active traders, and continues to hold the top spot as the most-used DeFi protocol by trading volume. According to data from Dune Analytics, Uniswap accounts for 48,7% of the daily volume of money being traded through DeFi.
Source: Dune Analytics
UNI performance of 250% in 30 days
The value of UNI, the governance token launched by Uniswap, reached a new ATH on January 31, when its price exceeded $20,3 USD per unit. Although at the time of this writing, UNI is valued at around $18 USD, the token shows an incredible growth of more than 249% in the last month. UNI started January with a value below $5 USD, and closes the month above $19 USD.
Source: CoinGecko
In the case of Aave, the protocol token also reached a new ATH for this January 30, when its price exceeded $319,8 USD per unit.
Similarly, the COMP token from the decentralized lending protocol Compound is experiencing similar growth. The value of this token grew to $337 USD on January 30, although this did not surpass its all-time high seen in June 2020, when COMP reached $372 USD. Nevertheless, the rise in the value of these tokens is bringing more investors to the decentralized ecosystem.
Uniswap experienced a growth in its liquidity of 67% this month, while Compound saw growth of 56% in this same period. Aave's growth was also exponential this January, with an increase of no less than 87% in total liquidity.
The attractiveness of DeFi ecosystems is also reflected in the trading volume that occurs within the DEXs of these spaces, which this month grew by more than 142% compared to the trading volume seen on DEXs in December 2020. At the time of this edition, more than 60.744 million dollars are moved through DeFi DEXs such as Uniswap, SushiSwap, and Curve Finance.
WBTC also attracts investors to DeFi
Although it is not a DeFi protocol itself, the Wrapped Bitcoin, also known as WBTC, the Ethereum-wrapped Bitcoin token, is experiencing huge growth in its capitalization. DappRadar shows that the total liquidity of this token is close to 4.000 million dollars. This growth is due to the potential that WBTC has to bring Bitcoin users to enjoy the benefits of decentralized ecosystems, in an easy way through Ethereum.
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