DeFi TVL reaches $100B as Bitcoin pumps sentiment
Interest in Bitcoin (BTC) is fueling sentiment around the crypto industry, pushing the chain's capitalization to more than $100 billion on March 9.
According to data from Defilama, the global total value locked (TVL) in decentralized finance protocols has reached $100.1 billion, up more than $10 billion in the last 24 hours. However, these figures are still below the November 2021 figure of $189 billion.
Liquid staking protocol Lido leads the charts with $38.7 billion locked on chain, followed by staking ecosystem EigenLayer, and AAVE protocol with $11.5 billion TVL.
This is the first time in two years that DeFi TVL has surpassed $100 billion. The buoyant flow appears to be due to the return of positive sentiment in crypto markets since the launch of Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in January.
Institutional demand for the Bitcoin ETF pushed the cryptocurrency to a new all-time high this week, hitting $70,000 on March 8. According to BitMEX Research, assets in Bitcoin ETFs rose to $28 billion on the same day. The analysis does not include assets from the Greyscale fund, which switched from an over-the-counter (OTC) product to an ETF in January.
At X (formerly Twitter), rumors spread about OTC trading platforms running out of Bitcoin and turning to public exchanges to fulfill orders from clients. OTC desks accommodate large volume traders such as institutional investors.
A number of centralized crypto exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase, Kraken and Bybit, experienced outages after Bitcoin crossed $60,000, indicating a surge in trading volume. According to Crypto.com CEO Chris Marszalek, the exchange has hired 480 additional customer representatives to handle the surge in demand.
“Since there is so much retail interest and the price action is so fast, all algorithmic trading firms increase the amount of order allocation significantly and cancel what they want to send to the matching engine to protect their position,” said Cointelegraph's Ivo Crnkovic. – Rubsamen, chief strategy officer and technical lead for business on the dydx exchange.
Bitcoin moves capital to memecoins
Bitcoin's gains have led to the rise of memecoins in recent days. Data compiled by Bitget Research shows that memecoin KORRA has increased by 577% in the last seven days, followed by Ribbit (RIBBIT) by 235% and PUG AI (PUGAI) by 232% in the same period.
Popular tokens such as Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Pepe (PEPE) saw gains of 168% and 165% respectively. The market capitalization of Memecoins has reached $61 billion at the time of writing, according to Bitget data.
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