Interest is growing in several distributed financial platforms based on Ethereum and other blockchain networks. The growth of the entire sector was around 130% over the last 12 months, with Ethereum-based apps continuing to dominate.
According to the website DeFi Pulse, a service tracking the growth of the sector, this time last year, there was $305.95 million worth of Ether (ETH) and other digital assets locked up in decentralized financial applications. Today, that figure is more than $700 million.
The most popular DeFi application by far is the Maker DAO stablecoin lending project. A total of $385 million, or 2.4 million ETH, is currently locked in the Ethereum-based decentralized credit platform. Although this is considerably less than the June 2019 all-time high of $505 million (caused by ETH price fluctuations), in terms of actual Ether committed to the platform, Maker has never been more popular. There is currently 2.415 million ETH locked up in the DeFi app. The platform accounts for a massive 55.41 percent of the entire decentralized finance sector.
Other applications proving popular are the synthetic derivatives platform Synthetix, as well as the lending application Compound. These two platforms currently have more than $132 million and $96.5 million locked up in them. Both of them are also based on the Ethereum blockchain, as is almost every other popular DeFi application today.
In fact, you have to go down as far as the eighth position on the rankings list to find a DeFi application that’s not on the Ethereum network. With $7.2 million locked up, Bitcoin’s Lightning Network represents the largest decentralized payments platform in the industry. Despite reasonably high profile instances of adoption for the BTC micropayments scaling solution, BeInCrypto recently reported that 2019 was not the positive year that many people thought it would be for the Lightning Network.
Such clear growth in interest, even despite the price of ETH tumbling from its mid-2019 local high of around $351 to just $142, has been described by Twitter-based cryptocurrency analyst CryptoWolf (@IamCryptoWolf) as “parabolic.” According to them, the price of Ethereum’s native digital asset Ether will follow the clear upward trend exhibited in the DeFi sector, making it an easy decision for them to accumulate ETH.