As the industry edges into the last month in the third quarter of the year, data from DeFi Llama has revealed that the industry has already recovered 15.30% so far, from $54.66 billion it was on at the beginning of the quarter, to stand at $63.02 billion as at August 23, 2022. A Nairametrics report, quoting DeFi Llama noted that the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space has been having it rough as the ecosystem lost 68.13% representing $155.79 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL) in the second quarter of 2022.
It noted that the trend can be traced to the cryptocurrency market’s slow but steady recovery, which is led by Ether, the native token of the Ethereum blockchain. The Ethereum blockchain accounts for $35.44 billion or 56.24% of the TVL seen in the cryptocurrency space today.
Since the first of July, Ether has gained 56.65%, from $1,059.77 to stand at $1,660.10 as of the time of this writing. At peak prices in the third quarter, Ether has gained as much as 91%, as it traded a quarter of $2,022.79 on the 14th of August 2022 on news on the blockchain’s upcoming “Merge.”
The TVL is a measure of performance in the DeFi space. It measures the total value of cryptocurrencies that users “lock up” in various lending and staking protocols. It measures the commitment of cryptocurrencies locked up in a smart contract for any project, in a liquidity pool for lending or staked in a blockchain node for mining crypto that uses a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus method. TVL is widely used to measure the health of a cryptocurrency.
In July, Ethereum continued to have the highest amount of value frozen. On July 1, Ethereum TVL was roughly $31.58 billion and increased to $37.41 billion at the end of the month, an 18.46% increase. The Ethereum blockchain’s TVL peaked at $39.82 billion on August 14, 2022.
Besides its DeFi growth, there have been significant updates to the Polygon network this month. Numerous projects from the Terra ecosystem have moved to the Polygon network. This was primarily due to the Terra Development Fund, a multi-million-dollar program that assisted these projects with their relocation.
Polygon was also chosen to participate in the Disney Accelerator Program, which strives to promote the expansion of creative businesses. Artificial intelligence (AI), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and augmented reality (AR) technologies are heavily emphasized in this year’s Disney Accelerator class.
Additionally, Polygon has plans to launch a new web3 phone alongside tech startup Nothing, a London-based company that wants to “remove the barriers between people and technology.” Their goal with their new web3 smartphone is to enable NFT drops straight to their Android-based phone.
