As per DefiLlama, the popular tracking site, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is now a $200 billion industry. Since late June, the number has doubled. The metric that is used in these protocols is called the TVL or Total Value Locked. It refers to the token’s dollar value that is held in smart contracts in the DeFi protocols. This includes trading and lending platforms. Even though these estimates are not exactly perfect, it is unlikely that they counted the same coins multiple times.
The tracking site has looked at all the protocols across different blockchains. So, the figure encompasses some of the big blockchains such as Ethereum and some that are relatively newer to DeFi, such as Solana and Avalanche. Out of the $200 billion, a major portion of the value is held up in Ethereum projects. This figure is $140 billion which is 55% more than the estimate made by DeFi Pulse. The next blockchain in terms of majority is the Binance Smart Chain that accounts for $18.5 billion followed by Solana with $11.7 billion. This is followed by some other big chains like Terra, Avalanche, and Fantom.
There are some scaling networks built on Ethereum that have been included by DefiLlama as well including Polygon, Optimism, and Arbitrum. The latter two have been recently launched and therefore, have relatively smaller value amounts in protocols. Thanks to other chains’ DeFi protocols, Ethereum has lost their dominance, even if they have growing TVL and a strong market share. Even though its TVL has increased by four times, their dominance has declined from 98% to 68.5% in 2021.
