The active Ethereum addresses within all DeFi instruments have exceeded 150,000.
By mid-January, there were about 100,000 and since February there has been an acceleration in growth.
A year ago the number was less than 30,000, so in recent months it has increased fivefold, while at the beginning of 2019 it was less than 10,000.
While the absolute number may not seem particularly high, especially when compared for example with the numbers of CeFi platforms, growth seems very strong.
Among other things, the number of DAI users is also growing, having now exceeded 330,000 users, which is more than double the number of active addresses within DeFi platforms.
On the other hand, DAI is a stablecoin that is now widely used also on CeFi platforms, although it was born within one of the first DeFi protocols, MakerDAO.
It must be said, however, that the users of MakerDAO, which remains the leading platform of DeFi with almost 55% of the locked funds in this sector, are only just under 15,000, albeit growing.
DAI is now mainly used outside of MakerDAO and the DeFi world and this could be a very interesting development for DeFi itself in the future.
In other words, the massive growth of DeFi users seems to follow that of DAI users, suggesting still wide margins of growth.
However, it should be specified that these numbers are cumulative and do not refer to the number of daily active users, but to the total number of active users over time. Each user is usually active several times, so although this is not a perfect metric, it still serves to give an idea of the current trends.
These are metrics that reveal how many addresses have been active in these areas over time at a certain date, and not how many are active daily.
On the basis of these data, a current growth rate of 0.56% per day has been calculated, which would allow us to predict the achievement of one million DeFi users by March 2021 and ten million by May 2022.
If this were to happen, DeFi would begin to be somehow comparable in size to CeFi, although it will still take years and in the meantime, CeFi will also have grown.
However, the growth rate of CeFi users has now slowed down, so it is not at all impossible to imagine that over the next few years DeFi will actually involve a number of active users that is at least comparable to CeFi.
