DeFi: Tragedy on the Binance smart chain and progress on Ethereum

Over the past few days, Bitcoin and Ethereum prices have been running sideways, while some Decentralised Finance (DeFi) tokens have been doing surprisingly well – what happened in the DeFi sector this week?

The DeFi sector rallied slightly this week, with several Immediate Edge tokens rising between 5 and 15 percent. The performance of the sector is also reflected in the „ETF Token“ DeFi Pulse Index (DPI). Over the past seven days, the DeFi index has risen by 12.15 per cent:

DeFi Pulse Index TokensetsSource: tokensets.com

On a monthly basis, however, the Ethereum DeFi sector remains in a consolidation phase and DPI, the token representative of the DeFi sector, is currently hovering between the $500 and $350 price marks.

In addition, the capital managed by DeFi protocols recovered somewhat, rising from US$36 billion to US$38.36 billion at the time of going to press.
DeFi Pulse Total Value LockedSource: DeFi PulseIn addition, the total market capitalisation of DeFi projects grew by more than US$10 billion this week, according to CoinGecko. While many tokens as a whole were only able to recover slightly from the negative price performance of recent weeks, there was still a lot happening in the DeFi market this week.

SushiSwap expands to other blockchains

The decentralised exchange (DEX) SushiSwap (SUSHI) is currently looking for alternatives to the slow Ethereum blockchain. Due to the increased ETH transaction fees, the project wants to expand to other blockchains.

On 3 March, Joseph Delong, CTO of SushiSwap, announced on Twitter that DEX is expanding to the blockchain of xDai, Moonbeam Network, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Polygon (formerly Matic) and Fantom.

In addition, the SUSHI token has this week been integrated into the DeFi Pulse Index, which has a total of just under $130 million under management. With an allocation of around eight per cent, SUSHI is now the fifth largest token in the DeFi Index. Driven by these positive developments, SUSHI has risen by almost 30 per cent in the last 30 days.
430% price growth: Polygon (MATIC) scales Ethereum

Polygon is a project that wants to solve the scaling problem of Ethereum with so-called sidechains – you can find out what sidechains are here. The native token MATIC grew by over 430 per cent last month and many investors are currently speculating that the project will be able to scale ETH.

In decentralised finance, everyone is currently looking for solutions to Ethereum’s high transaction fees. Polygon has been able to benefit from two trends in recent weeks.

First, the project was able to help the increasingly popular non-fungible token game Aavegotchi scale on Ethereum. Secondly, the polygon-based DEX QuickSwap (QUICK) was able to set new records.

QuickSwap’s log managed just US$300,000 at the beginning of the year and now comes to over US$100 million. On 2 March, DEX recorded a daily trading volume of 38 million US dollars, far surpassing all other competitors. This makes QuickSwap the largest Layer 2 technology-based DEX by trading volume at the moment.

In less than three months, QuickSwap’s governance token has risen from under US$1 to US$385 at press time.