The decentralized finance (DeFi) sector has taken a beating over the past day, with several blue-chip tokens suffering significant losses.
UNI, the governance token of decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap is down 11.8%, slipping to an intraday low of $15.29, according to CoinGecko.
The token lost 16% of its value in the past two weeks and is currently 65.9% off its all-time high of $44.9 seen in May last year.
LINK, the native token of DeFi's leading oracle project Chainlink, has meanwhile slipped to a two-week low, losing 7.1% over the day and almost 20% in the past week.
Speaking to Decrypt earlier this month, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov revealed that the project is planning to add a staking option for LINK holders later this year.
However, the initial enthusiasm, which took LINK above $28 last week, is seemingly cooling off, with the token trading at $21.56 by press time.
Next Up for Chainlink in 2022: LINK Staking and ‘Internet of Blockchains’
Chainlink, which securely brings real-world data to the world of smart contracts, has come a long way since October 2018, when Decrypt first came across the decentralized oracle network provider at Berlin’s annual Web Summit. With smart contracts being a foundation of DeFi (decentralized finance), oracles that enable them to securely execute based on verifiable real-world events—such as a cryptocurrency reaching a certain value, or a measured lack of rainfall affecting an insurance payout—are...
CRV, the token powering Curve Finance, a decentralized trading platform focused on stablecoins and like-valued assets, is similarly down 7% since Tuesday, changing hands at $4.32 at press time.
CRV surged above $6.50 at the start of the year; however, the token's price retraced since then significantly, losing almost 30% in the past two weeks, as data from CoinGecko shows.
Loopring bucks DeFi downtrend
Elsewhere, LRC, the native token of the Layer 2-based crypto exchange Loopring, seems to be defying the downtrend, going up 3.7% over the day to a daily high of $1.19.
Brazil’s Hashdex to Launch DeFi ETF—The Sixth Crypto ETF in Brazilian Market
Crypto asset manager Hashdex today announced that it has received approval to launch what the company is describing as the “world's first” DeFi ETF. Developed in collaboration with cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks, Hashdex's new CF DeFi Index ETF—which will trade under the ticker DEFI11—will track the price of the CF Benchmark's DeFi Modified Composite Index. That index will itself track a basket of 12 tokens linked to the DeFi market, with Ethereum, Uniswap, AMP, and Curve making up...
However, this will come as little consolation to longer-term LRC holders as the token is down 20.2% over the last seven days and as much as 42.5% down in the past two weeks.
Looking at the bigger picture, data from DefiLlama shows that the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi protocols has sunk by roughly $25 billion since the start of the year, currently standing at $226.92 billion.
