According to the latest Blockchain Industry Report released from DappRadar, the world’s leading app store for decentralized apps, although DeFi-based activity increased by 3.7% month-over-month, the industry’s TVL declined by 10.47%.
Conversely, Ethereum scaling solutions have seen significant increases in their DeFi metrics amid the Merge, with Optimism being elevated to the top 10 blockchain rank with around $1 billion TVL.
Circle, the payments business behind USDC, responded to sanctions issued by OFAC on Tornado Cash by banning certain addresses and freezing $75,000 in cash, which in turn affected the stability of the DAI stablecoin, whose peg stability is maintained by USDC deposits.
The DeFi sector lost around $8.7 billion in TVL month over month as a result of the ban on using dYdX and Aave by anybody who has interacted with Tornado Cash. “Even though DeFi shows signs of recovery when analyzing the Industry Unique Active Wallets, the overall DeFi TVL is still suffering and presently sits at $74.21 billion, an alarming decrease considering that this amount was $250 billion less than eight months ago,” the DappRadar report stated.
Fortunately, the forthcoming Ethereum Merge seems to be driving development in the Ethereum-based Layer-2 (L2) protocols. First place goes to Optimism, a blockchain that has grown its locked value by 57.61% month over month to join the top 10. Its total locked value is over $1 billion. Following that comes Arbitrum, with a MoM increase of 14.36%, and then Polygon, with a MoM increase of 6.50% but a year-over-year decrease of 62.58%.
The report noted:
“Dapps developed on Ethereum Mainnet will continue to migrate to Layer-2s, due to liquidity mining incentives, cheaper gas prices, and the possibility of retroactive token airdrops. As users accumulate on these rollups and TVL develops, new protocols will be encouraged to be created directly on L2s, necessitating UX enhancements across on-ramps, wallets, and bridges to enroll users directly onto L2s.”
In contrast, the NFT market is experiencing hard times as seen by recent layoffs at Opensea, the reduction in trading volume depicted below, the depreciation of cryptocurrencies, and the potential for a massive liquidation of Bored Ape NFTs by BendDAO.
The peer-to-peer lending platform BendDAO is filing for bankruptcy. The platform enables users to borrow ETH by pledging NFTs as “collateral.” As collateral, BendDAO has 272 NFT from the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection (or 2.72 percent of the total). The decrease in the floor price has put 45 of these 272 loans in the “danger zone”; they may be auctioned off in the coming days. The whole BAYC collection may be affected by a sale of this magnitude (estimated at $5.3 million).
Despite these problems, two interesting new marketplaces—GameStop and Nickelodeon’s NFT Marketplace—launched in July. SudoSWAP, a new NFT marketplace that intends to change how crypto users think about NFT liquidity and deals, launched in August. This is made possible since the ‘Automated Market Maker’ (AMM) idea is being introduced to NFTs in this new market.
