After a relatively slow 2023, the decentralized finance (DeFi) market experienced a notable revival in the first half of 2024. As of August 16, the total value locked (TVL) within the ecosystem rose from $54.4 billion at the beginning of the year to $82.67 billion, representing a remarkable 51.9% growth.
What Is Happening in the Web3 Space?
One of the key drivers behind this significant increase has been the growing adoption process towards ecosystems. The average daily trading volume for crypto derivatives has risen from $1.8 billion in 2023 to $5 billion since the beginning of the year. Ran Hammer, Vice President of Business Development at Orbs, a Layer-3 blockchain network designed for trading, attributes this growth to several factors.
Details on the Matter
The growth within the ecosystem this year seems to have gained momentum from intense competition from new market participants and a resurgence in volume among established players. While dYdX continued to be the clear market leader for most of the first half of 2024, it faced increasing competition from emerging protocols like SynFutures, Hyperliquid, and RabbitX.
New Innovations and Players
The latter three projects benefited from the absence of native tokens, allowing their respective development teams to focus solely on product development and user acquisition instead of managing intricate token structures. Hyperliquid performed particularly well during this process, with the platform’s daily trading volume regularly surpassing $1 billion, overshadowing dYdX. The competitive edge seems to lie in the ability to maintain fully on-chain operations while matching the performance of centralized exchanges (CEXs) with competitive fees. Similarly, SynFutures emerged as the second highest-performing perpetual DEX in Q2 2024, recording over $98 billion in cumulative trading volume.
The first half of 2024 has shown that the DeFi market continues to evolve and attract new users and participants through innovation and competition. Growth trends are expected to continue in the second half of the year.
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