Ethereum, Solana reap TVL gains, but there’s more to the story

Posted: September 24, 2023

• Lending protocol Aave and RWA project Ondo Finance boosted Ethereum’s TVL.
• Solana made decent gains, while layer-2 chain Base struggled.

The past week proved to be a fruitful month for Web3 liquidity as the total value locked (TVL) across major networks and projects witnessed a considerable increase, according to a report by blockchain analytics protocol 0xScope.

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DeFi bolsters Ethereum

Ethereum [ETH], the largest chain for smart contracts, led the charge, adding $2.46 billion in capital to its holdings over the week, marking a 5.25% increase. The growth was fueled by Ethereum-based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols like Aave [AAVE] and Convex Finance.

Lending protocol Aave, in fact, witnessed capital addition of nearly $63 million into its V3 protocol, with a growth rate of 3.5%. In fact, a longer timeline graph from DeFiLlama revealed that TVL on Aave’s third version was up 13% from the previous month.

Source: DeFiLlama

For the uninitiated, Aave launched its third iteration V3 earlier this year, with features like improved capital efficiency and gas optimization. 0xScope stated that Aave’s dominance in TVL rankings was possibly due to migration of liquidity from the previous two versions to the newest one.

Apart from Aave, emerging real-world assets (RWA) protocol Ondo Finance also rose up the ranks. The platform accumulated $33.4 million in TVL over the past week, reinforcing the bullish sentiment around RWAs.

Solana gets pumped by liquid staking

While Ethereum topped the charts, another popular chain for DeFi operations, Solana [SOL], also registered considerable gains over the week. Solana-based liquid staking protocol was the biggest gainer, with more than $7 million worth of SOL coins getting locked on the platform.

Source: DeFiLlama

The project has been making parabolic moves over the last three months in terms of deposits and stakers. In fact, liquid staking seemed to be powering Solana’s DeFi. The king of them all, Lido Finance [LDO], saw inflows of around $3.3 million on Solana.

Base remains stagnant

Indeed, the established networks in terms of DeFi TVL showed their prowess yet again. However, the recently-launched layer-2 chain Base didn’t have too much to boast about.

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The Coinbase-backed project saw a meager TVL growth of just 0.04% over the past week. Recall that Base lost $27 million in liquidity last week.

0xScope said that Base entered a “bottleneck” period following the growth wave it witnessed in August.