Maker surges as value locked in DeFi again breaks past $4 billion

By Alexander Behrens

It appears that there’s no stopping DeFi, as the total value of assets locked passes another milestone...again.

The total value locked (TVL) in DeFi protocols has once again passed $4 billion according to DeFi Pulse, as the total amount of digital assets and value for currencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin continue to climb. The level up comes less than two weeks after crossing the $3 billion mark, indicating an accelerating pace of adoption for Ethereum’s hottest class of protocols.

We’ve been here before: DeFi Pulse’s site showed $4 billion last week. But it appears that the site then recalibrated its numbers. This time, however, it’s for real.

Crypto loan protocol Maker led the pack over the past week, marking new all-time highs for TVL and adding nearly $600 million in value since July 21, more than a 90% increase. The amount of both Bitcoin and Maker’s DAI stablecoin locked in Maker’s contracts have seen particularly large increases since July 23, rising 86% and 414%, respectively.

Maker has more than $1.2 billion in total locked value, constituting 30% of the overall DeFi market.

Lending protocol Aave has also seen substantial growth in total value locked, nearly doubling the figure since July 18 to more than $490 million. Aave recently released its plan for distributed governance, terms Aavenomics, in the wake of synthetic asset protocol Synthetix initiating their three-way DAO governance scheme.

Curve.finance, a token swap protocol popular among the yield farming crowd added to the total, growing more than 250% since July 17; currently, $281 million is locked up in its smart contracts. Much of the attention around Curve has been focused on the ongoing experiment in bottom-up governance that is yEarn.finance, which itself has posted jaw-dropping growth of more than 2,100% since July 17.

Recent growth in total locked value couldn’t have been achieved without the addition of more than 5,000 Bitcoin ($58 million) to the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem. Bitcoin value transferred and locked in Ethereum via wrap-ups like WBTC and Synthetix sBTC grew more than 30% since July 21.

The move from $2 billion to $3 billion total value locked took three weeks, while the move for $3 billion to $4 billion took less than two. The accelerating pace at which DeFi protocols are attracting value may be cause for excitement, the slew of recently released governance tokens could attract attention from the watchful eye of SEC regulation.

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