How $55bn DeFi lending market overtook liquid staking

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The DeFi ecosystem is changing.

On the eve of Ethereum’s 2023 “Shapella” upgrade, liquid staking became the biggest sub-sector in DeFi. By March 2024, liquid staking accounted for more than one out of every three dollars in a DeFi protocol.

But its long reign is over. Earlier this year, lending-and-borrowing protocols such as Aave supplanted liquid staking protocols like Lido as the hottest business in decentralised finance.

Today, $55.6 billion in crypto is sitting in lending protocols, according to DefiLlama data. That’s about 28% of the $198 billion DeFi ecosystem.

And as the liquid staking era ends, another one, dominated by lending stalwart Aave, is just beginning.

The value of crypto deposited in Aave has doubled since the eve of Donald Trump’s November election, and it’s now sitting on about $26 billion.

But Aave isn’t the only lending protocol to see substantial growth over the past year.

Since November 1, the value of crypto deposited in Morpho has tripled, to $4.5 billion. The value of crypto deposited in Maple has grown more than fivefold, to more than $1.7 billion. Euler, the victim of a devastating 2023 hack, saw its deposits balloon from about $10 million to more than $1.1 billion.

At an Ethereum-focused conference in Cannes, France last week, Aave founder Stani Kulechov shared some thoughts on the DeFi lending boom.

“If you go a few years back, even participants in our space necessarily weren’t using DeFi. They were using the centralised alternatives,” he said from one of the conference’s stages.

But centralised crypto lenders such as Celsius filed for bankruptcy amid the cascading failures that began with the collapse of the Terra blockchain in 2022.

Those businesses “were managing their risk so horribly that they were using DeFi in the back end, because that’s all that they could actually do at that point, because they couldn’t add any value,” Kulechov continued.

“So virtually all lending that existed mainly in these centralised platforms moved into DeFi, which is amazing. And I think DeFi has a stronghold now on this category.”

Morpho co-founder Paul Frambot has another theory.

But simple metrics like “total value locked” — which measures the dollar value of crypto deposited in a protocol’s smart contracts — also favours lending protocols, Frambot cautioned.