DeFi Trails Broader Market Uptrend to Hit New TVL at $223 Billion

The Total Value Locked (TVL) in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols have crossed the biggest range in history. It is trading at its highest value of $223 billion, according to data from DeFiLlama.

The current uptick in DeFi’s TVL is marked as an encompassing growth in the broader digital currency industry, whose market cap now sits at $2.42 trillion at the time of writing.

By ranking, Curve Finance comes off as the most prominent protocol in the space and currently holds a total of $17.14 billion in Total Value Locked. As an interoperable decentralized exchange liquidity pool on Ethereum, the protocol’s uptrend growth is similar to the broader ecosystem, with the largest bit of assets locked on the Ethereum protocol.

Lending protocol Aave also sits comfortably in the second position with a $16.69 billion TVL, with the top five largest protocols made up by MakerDAO, Wrapped Bitcoin, and InstaDapp. Despite the biggest contributors of Ethereum blockchain native protocols, other public blockchain networks, including the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Avalanche, and Fantom, also have protocols that contribute their bit to the overall growth.

DeFi has grown to offer new assistance to a wide range of investors as mainstream investment offerings do not look promising. The advent of the coronavirus pandemic placed a massive burden on the global economy. Based on this situation, central banks around the world set extremely low-interest rates to ease off the pressures. Investment securities, including government and corporate bonds, interests in savings, and others, directly impacted the broad economic fallout.

The shakedown of the global economy presented an opportunity for decentralized finance to showcase itself, offering higher interest rates and correspondingly lowering the barriers to entry per crypto-backed loans. 

The growth of DeFi has seen the TVL climb from $13.7 billion back in November 2020 to the $223 billion it currently is today, a price point that showcases the blockchain offshoot is just getting started.