This week has seen some amazing advances in decentralized finance (DeFi). In the past week, major DeFi platforms have seen huge increases in their total value locked, continued developments on popular liquidity pools, and numerous projects beginning to utilize the technology.
For those of you unfamiliar with DeFi, it’s an emerging set of financial tools that are built on top of existing blockchains like Ethereum and are designed to create open and accessible financial systems outside of traditional banking institutions. Decentralized finance (DeFi) has been consistently growing since its rise in 2018, and looks to be a major trend going forward.
This week DeFi has seen a massive surge of activity. As per the data from DeFi Pulse, the eight largest projects make up a combined total value locked (TVL) of over $5.5 billion. The total TVL of all DeFi projects have now passed $8.5 billion. Popular Uniswap was up to $1.7 billion TVL at time of writing, as well as Maker with $2.6 billion.
Moreover, significant progress has been made on the developments of two major liquidity pools, Balancer and Curve. The Balancer protocol, an automated liquidity protocol, has seen its Balancer Pool token surge to an all-time high. This is largely due to their continuous push to make the platform even more secure, with the inclusion of non-custodial staking pools and liquidity tracking. Also, Curve, a protocol built to simplify trading between stablecoins, is currently in the deployment phase of its new yield farming feature.
With the rise in popularity of DeFi, many projects have begun utilizing its technology and features to create innovative financial products. MakerDAO, one of the leading decentralized finance platforms, is currently working with an unnamed, venture-backed startup to develop a global credit card for low-income citizens in developing countries. Also, Dharma Protocol has just raised $7 million in a new investment round and will use the capital to build its automated lending protocol, which is designed to be an open lending market for borrowers and lenders worldwide.
Decentralized finance is an exciting new world of decentralization, with lots of innovative projects built on top of it and already being utilized. It looks like the upswing in DeFi is only going in one direction, meaning that the recent developments look to be here to stay – and if you want to stay up to date in the DeFi world then make sure you follows us for more.