In brief

  • Interest in DeFi has slowed since the summer’s investment explosion.
  • But money is still being pumped into DeFi projects.
  • In just the past week, $1.32 billion more has been locked into DeFi projects’ smart contracts, according to DeFi Pulse.

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The world of decentralized finance (DeFi) could be picking back up after adding over $1 billion to its smart contracts in just one week.  

Since last Saturday, the total value locked into the DeFi world rose from $11.16 billion to $12.48 billion, according to figures from metrics site DeFi Pulse. 

Sure, the amount of money being pumped into DeFi projects—that’s non-custodial financial products—isn’t as high as it was in the summer, and overall growth is slowing. But there is still interest and it looks like there will be for some time yet. 

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The vast majority of that $12.48 billion was invested this year. Most of it is locked into Ethereum, the platform nearly all DeFi projects build upon. 

The top three DeFi projects—Uniswap, Maker, Wrapped Bitcoin—contain over half of the $12.48 billion. 

And as interest in DeFi projects has grown, so has the price of their tokens. In the past 24 hours, the price of yearn.finance is up 32%—bringing the value of a single YFI token to $14,275.33, according to CoinMarketCap. 

While Aave has risen by 15.13% and Chainlink, nearly 7%. 

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Interest in DeFi projects partly surged this year when investors found out they could lend their assets by staking them in DeFi smart contracts and make insane returns. 

The craze, known as yield farming, was predicted to be a bubble by some, and a lot of the volumes on decentralized exchanges has already plummeted. 

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