The total value of the cryptocurrency locked in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications has surpassed the $1 billion mark thanks to the cryptocurrency market’s positive performance so far this year.
According to data from DeFi Pulse, the value hit $1 billion today, February 7, after rising exponentially over the last 12 months, as in February 2019 about $279 million worth of cryptocurrency were locked into DeFi apps.
The Ethereum-based lending protocol Maker Is the leader in the decentralized finance space. Maker allows users to issue the Dai stablecoin, traded on the Oasis app, and earn interest on stablecoin holdings using the Dai Savings Rate (DSR). It has about $599 million worth of crypto locked in it.
Other popular applications in the decentralized finance space are Synthetix, a platform that allows for the creation of “on-chain synthetic assets that track the value of real-world assets,” and Compound, an application that lets users earn interest on holdings or borrow funds against collateral.
While the total value of assets locked in the decentralized finance space hit the $1 billion mark, the total amount of ETH locked has been hovering around the 3.15 million ether for a few weeks. The DeFi space also includes Bitcoin’s layer-two scaling solution, the Lightning Network, which has around $8.5 million worth of BTC locked in it.
The total value of assets hit $1 billion thanks to the price rise of both ether and bitcoin, as both cryptocurrencies are up so far this year. CryptoCompare data shows that over the past 30 days BTC went up nearly 17%, while ETH went up around 55.8%.
On social media some users criticized the flagship cryptocurrency’s layer-two scaling solution for contributing so little to the DeFi space when compared to Ethereum-based decentralized applications.
Featured image via Pixabay.
