DeFi Tokens Post Double-Digit Gains Amid Crypto Market Recovery

As markets head into the holiday weekend with Bitcoin getting back above $50,000, a number of decentralized finance (DeFi) blue-chip tokens are leading the charge, posting solid gains over the last day.

SUSHI, the governance token of the popular Ethereum-based decentralized exchange (DEX) SushiSwap, is up 12% today, changing hands at $7.55 by press time, according to CoinGecko.

The token went into a freefall in early November, tumbling from above $13 to below $5 at the beginning of December amid infighting within the protocol’s team leading to the departure of CTO Joseph Delong.

Since then, several proposals for the future governance of the project were introduced, including the onboarding of Daniele Sesta, the person spearheading Frog Nation, a group of DeFi projects including Abracadabra.Money and Wonderland.Money.

SushiSwap CTO Resigns, Citing Chaos ‘Within And Without’ The Project

Joseph Delong, the chief technical officer of the popular Ethereum-based decentralized exchange (DEX) SushiSwap, has quit his role effective immediately. Delong took to Twitter to announce his departure from the project on Wednesday, saying he’s taking a month-long vacation with the family before launching a new project. In the interest of the Sushi Community I am resigning as CTO effective immediately. I very much enjoyed the things that we built together and will look back positively on this...

SUSHI is still down 10% over the last 30 days, however. But the token has been on an upward trajectory in recent days, surging by an impressive 33% over the last week.

New all-time high for LUNA

Meanwhile, LUNA, the native token of the Terra network, looks unstoppable as it is up 15% in the last 24 hours, hitting a new all-time high above $100 earlier today. Just last week, the token was trading at $63.

The price of LUNA surged 54% over the last seven days, with the growing demand for TerraUSD (UST)—Terra’s U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin—being one of the driving forces behind such a spectacular rise.

Earlier this week UST flipped DAI to become the industry’s fourth-largest stablecoin, and more positive news came earlier on Friday as the asset began trading on major crypto exchange Binance.

Institutions embrace Aave

AAVE, the native token of the industry’s most popular lending and borrowing protocol Aave, is up 13% today, hitting a three-week high above $256, per CoinGecko.

The asset’s latest price action comes hot on the heels of SEBA, a fully-regulated Swiss-based digital bank, putting forth a proposal to get whitelisted on Arc, Aave’s permissionless DeFi platform for institutional investors.

As explained by SEBA, the bank has seen “increasing institutional demand to access DeFi liquidity protocols like Aave over the past months."

"SEBA has a significant interest from its client base to participate in Aave Arc and with its tight connections to money managers in Switzerland and beyond, SEBA is ideally positioned to bridge institutional liquidities in the Aave Arc protocol," reads the proposal.

Elsewhere, Ethereum, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, is up 4% today, trading at $4,104 by press time, while the price of other major assets such as Cardano and Solana surged by 7.9% and 6.6%, respectively.