DeFi market cap has crossed $1 billion, and this new tool helps track it

A new contender has entered the ring to compete with the likes of DeFi Pulse and CoinMarketCap, adding a fresh data view to the world of decentralized finance (DeFi).

Analytics website DeFiMarketCap launched on Monday—a project developed by the team behind DeFi investment aggregator Zerion. The site provides information on the top DeFi tokens by market capitalization, along with other common metrics such as price and circulating supply. It’s very much like industry staple CoinMarketCap, only it’s specifically designed for the burgeoning DeFi market.

At the moment, 230 tokens are currently listed on the site, with more being added each day. DeFiMarketCap also shows the aggregate total market cap for all listed tokens. And, according to the site, that total has now crossed the billion-dollar mark: $1.04 billion as of the time of this writing.

In a Twitter thread following the launch, Zerion CEO Evgeny Yurtaev explained how the DeFiMarketCap developers were inspired to build the site by the one-year anniversary of winning first place for their DeFi build in a Y Combinator hackathon, an early implementation of linking bank accounts to the Compound protocol. 

Unsatisfied with existing tools for tracking growth in the DeFi ecosystem, Yurtaev, alongside Zerion CTO Alexey Bashlykov and COO Vadim Koleoshkin, built the DeFiMarketCap website over Easter weekend.

In an interview, Yurtaev provided additional context for the rapidly deployed website and what comes next: “It was a speedy project for us. We just really like the idea ourselves, but we do have plans to add more stuff to it,” he told Decrypt.

“First, we will support more assets; there are clearly a lot that we are missing,” he said. “Second, we plan to support historical prices, and we [plan to add] an option to show underlying tokens for each derivative DeFi asset.” Several DeFi projects have already requested to be added to the site including Curve, Idle, and PieDAO. 

As for what sets DeFiMarketCap apart from other DeFi analytics tools, Yurtaev said that the industry is now at a point where tools are needed to measure the market cap of tokens related to projects such as Maker or Synthetix, which are used to fund and govern applications, as opposed to simply the value of collateral locked within the projects themselves, as provided by DeFi Pulse. 

DeFiMarketCap, he said, also provides an alternative to CoinMarketCap, which was recently acquired by Binance at the end of March, for those who want a DeFi-centric view of crypto and the coins within the industry.