Which are the DeFi’s top 10 coins, namely the decentralized finance ones?
First of all it must be said that there are hundreds of tokens linked to DeFi projects, but many are little known or used.
To select the most important ones it is better to use the ranking of DeFi tokens with the highest market capitalization.
Actually this ranking is dominated by a token, LINK, which is not directly connected to a real decentralized finance project.
LINK at the top of the ranking of DeFi coins
The Chainlink project provides decentralised oracles for DeFi protocols, but it is not a financial protocol itself.
However, partly because its rise has also marked the rise of decentralised finance, partly because Chainlink oracles are actually used in DeFi (though not only in DeFi), its token LINK is commonly regarded as belonging to the DeFi sector.
The fact is that it dominates the ranking of DeFi tokens with the highest market capitalization, with its almost 3.9 billion dollars, or almost four times the market capitalization of the second one.
Moreover, until July 2020, the LINK token had never exceeded the $5 price, but then, together with the huge and sudden development of DeFi, it rose to over $18 in less than three weeks, and then dropped back around the current $10.
The second and third place are occupied by two other tokens that are in some ways anomalous. These two tokens are certainly linked to DeFi projects, but not only.
In fact, in second place for market capitalization, with over a billion dollars, there is WBTC (Wrapped Bitcoin), that is one of the ERC-20 tokens representing Bitcoin on the Ethereum blockchain. Although WBTC is considered to all intents and purposes a DeFi project, in reality it is nothing more than the representation of Bitcoin on another blockchain.
In third position, with almost 900 million dollars, there is the DAI stablecoin, generated by the DeFi MakerDAO protocol. Certainly it is a DeFi token, but being a stablecoin it is mainly used as a service tool.
In fourth position there is the UniSwap UNI token, with 630 million dollars market capitalization. This is a very young token, created less than a month ago to counter the success of SushiSwap’s yield farming.
In fifth position, with 618 million, is LEND, the token of the Aave liquidity pool. This token has been in existence since the end of 2017, but it was only in June this year that it began to gain market attention, so much so that it has become one of the main players in the DeFi sector.
In sixth position there is the famous YFI token of Yearn.finance, with $555 million. Born only in July, it went from $34 to over $42,000 in less than two months.
In seventh position there is the SNX token of the Synthetix protocol, with $529 million market capitalization, while in eighth position, with $500 million, there is MKR, the governance token of MakerDAO.
Then there are eight other tokens that have a capitalization of more than 200 million, including COMP (Compound), and seven others that have a capitalization of more than $100 million.
In total, DeFi tokens capitalize about $13 billion, which is less than Tether (USDT), which is in third place behind Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Although LINK is the seventh cryptocurrency by market capitalization, there is still an abyss compared to Bitcoin, and a considerable distance behind Ethereum.
