DeFi Records ‘Exponential’ Growth in Assets

Decentralized finance (DeFi) continues to grow at an exponential rate with the number of new DeFi assets increasing by almost ten fold over the same time last year. 

Zerion DeFi project founder Evgeny Yurtaev shared a graphic on Twitter showing the number of new assets almost doubled in the last month and commented that growth “looks exponential to me”. The number of new assets reached over 1,000 for the first time last month with Uniswap Protocol accounting for approximately 75% of them.

New DeFi assets per month. 

“Similar to what [the] Internet did to content, DeFi is doing to finance,” Yurtaev said,

“DeFi is the new FinTech. It all comes down to the cost of distribution. [The] Internet brought it close to zero for the content. However, it did not happen in finance.”

Road to 600K

The total number of DeFi users over time is edging towards 600K according to Ethereum analytics platform Dune Analytics. The total number of DeFi users hit 193K in May with most of the growth coming from Kyber (74,360) and Uniswap (70,739). The figures exclude 362K DAI users. 

Ethereum DeFi users over time. Source: Dune Analytics

The increase in year to date is just under 100K users with only March experiencing a slight drop in the number of new users, potentially caused by the global spread of COVID-19.

Distrust drive adoption

Although the total numbers remain small in the overall scheme of things, adoption is growing and this is likely to increase as projects become more user-friendly. The market cap of all DeFi projects has surpassed $2 billion according to DeFi Market Cap.

A report by CoinGecko saw that 89% of respondents knew about Defi with the most well known app being MetaMask.