Decentralized Finance on Ethereum

DeFi and Ethereum are almost synonymous and the DeFi directory Defiprime lists 214 Ethereum DeFi projects which indicates a significant growth over the last couple of years.

DappRadar even lists 2,990 decentralized applications (DApp). No other blockchain has inspired more developers, and Ethereum’s stack has become the de facto standard for many other blockchains. Even strong competitors such as Avalanche, Moonbeam or Fantom feature EVM compatibility to allow teams easy portability of projects from Ethereum.

Names such as Uniswap, Curve, dYdX and Instadapp have all deployed on Ethereum first and moved on to become household names in the crypto community. Ethereum is where DeFi was invented, and it is the protocol with the most exciting innovations, such as dYdX or OlympusDAO, and the largest and wealthiest user base.

Source: The Defiant

Total Value Locked (TVL) on Ethereum DeFi

It is no surprise that the most value in decentralized finance is locked on Ethereum. DeFi applications on this blockchain control more than $150 billion.

Source: Defi Llama

The three most significant projects — Curve, Convex Finance and MakerDAO — account for 36% of all TVL on Ethereum. Counting locked value has some crucial challenges, however. Staked coins can be used in farms whose liquidity provider tokens can again be further deployed and so on. The double- and triple-counting of an uncertain percentage of all assets is unavoidable. TVL numbers should be viewed as a general indicator of growth and activity and not be taken at face value.

There are two other aspects to DeFi on Ethereum that are very important: DApps and NFTs. In next weeks article we will take a closer looks at those aspects to see where their importance lies in the general Ethereum ecosystem.

This article is an extract from the 80+ page Scaling Report: Does the Future of Decentralized Finance Still Belong to Ethereum? co-published by the Crypto Research Report and Cointelegraph Consulting, written by ten authors and supported by Arcana, Brave, ANote Music, Radix, Fuse, Cryptix, Casper Labs, Coinfinity, Ambire, BitPanda and CakeDEFI.