Sushi, Lido Finance Drop 10% as Top DeFi Tokens Plunge

It's blood red in the world of DeFi on Thursday morning. 

Tokens backing decentralized finance protocols including SushiSwap, Lido Finance, Curve, and Uniswap have all plummeted over the past day, according to data from CoinGecko.

SUSHI, the governance and staking token behind the decentralized exchange project, has dropped a whopping 10% over the past 24 hours. The token is now trading hands at $1.13, falling from $1.26 this time yesterday. 

SushiSwap is a decentralized exchange that was initially forked from market leader Uniswap. They added a variety of new features as well as released the SUSHI token, a key offering that Uniswap did not have at the time. 

SUSHI’s bearish price action, however, began shortly after the DeFi protocol’s newly-appointed CEO Jared Grey was accused of a number of improprieties in a Twitter thread; Grey has since addressed each of the allegations in a public letter, denying all. 

The second-biggest loser in the DeFi sector has been the token behind Lido Finance. LDO has plunged nearly 10% over the past 24 hours and is now trading at $1.19 per token. 

Lido Finance is the market’s most popular liquid staking service, commanding a market share of nearly 30%. There are no other staking services, DeFi or otherwise, that have attained double-digit market share, according to Dune Analytics.

Curve Finance, the like-asset DeFi exchange, has also fallen several points on Thursday. The project’s governance token, CRV, has dropped more than 9% over the past 24 hours and is now trading at $0.75. 

Earlier this year, the token played a central role in what were the Curve Wars, during which speculators and protocols alike scrambled to scoop up as much CRV as possible. The token was trading at roughly $5.40 a token at that time, marking a hefty 86% drop. 

Finally, the token behind Uniswap, DeFi’s most voluminous decentralized trading platform, has fallen by nearly 8% over the past day. UNI is used in governance to let its holders vote and create proposals for any changes made to the protocol. 

Though the team behind the project, Uniswap Labs, has big plans to take on its centralized counterparts in Binance and Coinbase, token holders may not be quite as optimistic these days about those ambitions. 

Elsewhere in the market, all eyes are on the newest Core Price Index (CPI) report this afternoon, with inflation numbers expected to continue their upward trend. 

If these figures indeed show continued inflation, it’s likely the Federal Reserve will continue its aggressive rate hikes; something that could see asset prices, crypto and beyond, continue to drop.