Cryptocurrency markets have recovered strongly over the weekend, and decentralized finance (DeFi) assets lead the way, with many notching up double-digit gains.
The total market capitalization for all crypto assets has topped $1.6 trillion again as Bitcoin and its brethren made a weekend recovery, and cryptocurrency trading heats up again.
The king of crypto managed to reclaim the psychological $50,000 price barrier over the weekend, hitting a high of $51,800 in early trading in Asia on Monday morning. Ethereum prices had made a gain of 5% on the day to reach $1,750 at the time of writing.
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BTC is currently up around 2.5% over the past 24 hours, but the DeFi tokens are really making a move today.
Uniswap’s UNI is now larger than Litecoin
Tokens relating to decentralized finance are making a big comeback, with many of them making double-digit gains, according to Messari Crypto.
Leading the pack is Uniswap’s UNI token which has entered the market cap top ten in the eighth spot with a 13% climb on the day to reach $34.40.
The token has gained over 50% in the past seven days and has a current market cap of almost $18 billion, making UNI larger than Litecoin.
The decentralized exchange provides token swapping functionality and liquidity provision incentives however it has become expensive to use recently due to elevated Ethereum transaction fees.
Uniswap founder Hayden Adams highlighted February performance for the exchange:
The RAY token from another recently launched decentralized exchange called Raydium is also performing well. This one has made 24% over the past day to reach $8.80.
DeFi aggregator Yearn Finance has also enjoyed good momentum from its native YFI token, which has cranked 18% on the day to top $41,000.
Several other lower cap DeFi tokens including UMX, DEXM, SFI, REN, have also notched up huge gains over the past couple of days.
DeFi Total Value Locked
A measure of market health for the DeFi sector is total value locked which counts the collateral across all major protocols in dollar terms.
According to Dappradar.com, this value is currently $44.67 billion, which is not far off its all-time high of $51.6 billion on Feb. 21.
The largest protocol by TVL is lending platform MakerDAO which has $6.2 billion in locked collateral and a market share of around 17%.
Interest earning protocol Compound Finance is second, while flash loan platform Aave is the third-largest in terms of collateral lockup.
