The latest upgrade to lending and borrowing protocol Aave has been greeted with a swell of buying activity.
The project's native ERC-20 token AAVE, which is used for staking and governance on the platform, has risen by more than 17% over the past 24 hours, according to data pulled from CoinMarketCap.
At press time, AAVE is trading at just over $147, a price that is still nearly 80% lower than the token's all-time high of $632, hit back in May 2021.
Aave's latest price action has primarily been driven by the launch of its long-awaited "V3" upgrade.
Updates include integrations with various Layer-2 scaling solutions, optimizations for gas costs, tons of new crypto wallet integrations, and more.
1/ Aave V3 is here! 👻 The most powerful version of the Aave Protocol to date, V3 brings groundbreaking new features than span from increased capital efficiency to enhanced decentralization. Read what's new in V3 in the thread below👇or visit https://t.co/H3jTyKRqNs to dive in! pic.twitter.com/LXzn7660nA
First called ETHLend in 2017, Aave is the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector's largest protocol by total value locked (essentially another way of saying how much money is held inside a project).
According to DeFi Llama, a data dashboard for all things DeFi, Aave commands a whopping $19.37 billion. With the entire sector holding more than $250 billion, this gives Aave a roughly 7% slice of the market.
Decrypting DeFi is Decrypt's DeFi email newsletter. (art: Grant Kempster)
Last week we dug into some interesting updates around O.G. DeFi protocol Maker.
There were many notable changes, including a new fixed-yield mechanism called “D3M” as well as adding staked Ethereum (stETH) as collateral to the protocol. The project’s native stablecoin, DAI, is also officially decentralized now that Ethereum is the number one asset backing the coin.
These updates were incredibly bullish for MKR, Maker’s...
Runner ups include decentralized exchange (DEX) Curve Finance and the Terra-based Anchor Protocol.
Elsewhere in the DeFi market, other blue-chip tokens in Maker (MKR) and Synthetix (SNX) have also enjoyed hefty double-digit jumps, with both tokens up over 10% in the past 24 hours.
Maker is DeFi's central bank of sorts, turning Ethereum deposits into the stablecoin DAI. The loans are overcollateralized, meaning you must deposit more Ethereum (in terms of dollars) than you’ll receive in DAI. Still, it's one of the oldest decentralized stablecoins on the market.
For its part, Synthetix came to the fore promising various crypto versions of more traditional assets like gold, oil, stocks, bonds, and also cryptocurrencies for use within the Synthetix ecosystem.
Compound, another Ethereum-based lending protocol, is also up over 7%, while SushiSwap, a forked iteration of the popular DEX Uniswap, has also risen over 8% over the past 24 hours.
As for Ethereum, the base network upon which these DeFi projects were built, is currently up over 3% on the day and nearly 7% over the week.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.
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