The total volume locked in DeFi tools reached $1 billion ($1,000 M$) for the first time.
This can be seen on defipulse.com, which shows that since February 1st, 2020 there has been a new surge.
In fact, until the middle of January, the total volume was stable below $700 million, but thanks to recent increases in the value of cryptocurrencies this figure first rose to more than 800 million on January 18th and then surged again starting January 27th, first exceeding $900 million, to then reach $1 billion today.
DeFi and the close relationship with Ethereum
This recent peak was not caused by the amount of ETH locked, which in recent days has fallen from 3.2 million to 3.1 million tokens. However, since the price of ETH in the same period increased from $176 to $217, this has caused the USD volume of assets locked in DeFi to grow.
In other words, it was the increase in the prices of ETH and BTC that caused this growth and not the increase in the amount of ETH locked.
Actually though, locked BTC in DeFi has increased in the last few days, from 1,500 to 1,560, but this increase has had a very little significant impact. Surely the biggest impact has been the increase in the value of BTC from around $9,200 to $9,700.
In addition, there has also been an increase in locked DAI in DeFi, which has risen in recent days from around $50 million to over $65 million. Actually, since November of last year, when the DAI locked were less than 20 million, there has been a real surge, reaching 66 million today.
However, the USD volume of locked DAI is still very small compared to that of ETH, which represents almost two-thirds of the entire locked volume in DeFi.
Moreover, almost 60% of this volume is locked on Maker, the platform that generates the DAI tokens, while as far as BTC is concerned, the ERC20 WBTC token is slowly growing and getting closer to Lightning Network, considering that LN’s growth is slower from this point of view.
