🔎The state of DeFi in 7 charts
weekly valuable insights
Today’s email is brought to you by Altitude - The DeFi app with the best borrowing rates
In today’s newsletter:
🔎The state of DeFi in 7 charts
😂 Crypto meme of the week
🗞️ The latest DeFi news
🔎The state of DeFi in 7 charts
2025 has been a great year for DeFi so far.
We’ve gone from Gary Gensler leading a hostile SEC to a crypto-friendly regulatory environment. And by nearly every metric, DeFi adoption is booming.
So I thought that now would be a great time to take a closer look at a few charts that show where the market stands today and what sectors are trending.
Here are seven charts that reveal the current state of DeFi:
The DEX to CEX trading volume keeps hitting new records
Slowly but surely, DEXs are stealing market share from CEXs.
In June 2022, perpetual DEXs had only 0.98% market share in the derivatives sector. 3 years later, this figure is 11 times higher.
Fluid is the fastest-growing DEX
For a short period, Fluid DEX managed to surpass Uniswap in daily trading volume on Ethereum. This comes less than a year after its launch.
With Fluid DEX V2 launching soon, I wouldn’t be surprised if Fluid ends up winning the DEX wars on Ethereum.
In terms of capital efficiency, DEX V2 is expected to be way more efficient than V1.
A yield-bearing stablecoin is leading in inflows for the first time
A few days ago, Ethena’s USDe stablecoin surpassed USDT and USDC in 2-week net flows for the first time. Why does this matter?
Because USDT and USDC have been leading in stablecoin adoption for a very long time. Now, crypto-native solutions are finally challenging their dominance.
My prediction is that Resolv, Ethena, and Falcon Finance will continue growing exponentially in the next months.
Spot ETH ETFs have been performing well, but are slowing down
After several weeks of constantly hitting new record high inflows, spot Ethereum ETFs have recently recorded their largest daily outflow ever.
The reason might be that some TradFi whales have taken profits.
Still, if we look at the big picture, the past two months have been the best ones so far for spot Ethereum ETFs.
Before we continue, here’s an overview of Altitude, the go-to DeFi borrowing protocol:
Together with Altitude
THE BEST BORROWING RATES IN DEFI
What if you could get paid for borrowing?
Recently, a user borrowed $135K through Altitude.fi to buy a Tesla.
A few months later, he borrowed another $62K. Nearly a year later, his total loan value is down (not up) by $19K.
How? Altitude automates loan management and pays down your debt over time. If that loan had been taken on Aave, the user would’ve paid $10K in interest instead.
The difference is $29,000 in the user’s favor thanks to Altitude.
Here’s why you should use it:
Best Borrowing Rates in DeFi - Altitude routes your collateral to wherever the borrowing rates are best, across Aave, Morpho, and other money markets
Yield-bearing assets are accepted as collateral - You can borrow stablecoins against wstETH or cbBTC without having to sell your long-term bags
Its on-chain metrics are surging - In the past 3 months alone, the protocol’s TVL went from $3.2M to over $18M
On top of that, Altitude also has an incentive program.
By using it, you can earn free ALTI tokens at a $70M FDV, which will become tradeable at the TGE (which is expected in Q4).
Get the best borrowing rates with Altitude!
DeFi is getting close to surpassing AI in mindshare
For over a year, AI has been leading in mindshare.
This is starting to change though. DeFi mindshare is up more than 2x in the past months. Meanwhile, the mindshare of memes has drastically decreased.
Fundamentals are starting to matter again.
Protocols with buyback programs have been top performers in 2025
This is a sign that the market is starting to reward the tokens with solid fundamentals.
The subcategory of protocols that are doing token buybacks includes projects such as Hyperliquid, Pump Fun, Maple, EtherFi, Kaito, AAVE, and a few others.
BTC exchange reserves continue to decline
Since February 2024 (shortly after the first spot Bitcoin ETFs launched in the US), BTC exchange reserves have only been going down.
Typically, in the past bull markets, the opposite thing happened.
This cycle, though, the BTC ETF inflows and the buying pressure generated by crypto treasury companies had a massive positive impact on the BTC price.
With that being said, those are all the charts I wanted to show in this newsletter.
Overall, I’m pretty excited about the current state of the market.
As you’ve seen above, fundamentals are becoming increasingly important. And I really like to see that more and more projects are starting to buy back their tokens.
Hopefully, the prices will reflect all the recent progress in the coming months.
Crypto Meme😂
The latest developments in DeFi
Pendle released Boros, a new product for trading funding rates, on Arbitrum
Jupiter Lend, a money market powered by Fluid, went live in private beta on Solana
Silo Finance enabled earning high double-digit yields in one click with its new auto-leverage feature
Mantle welcomed Bybit’s Co-CEO and Head of Spot Trading as key advisors. This is expected to help Mantle gain stronger strategic alignment with Bybit
INFINIT launched its token called $IN and its airdrop claiming portal. IN can be staked to earn protocol fees and gain governance rights
GammaSwap released Yeld Tokens - a new primitive enabling users to earn AMM yield with no impermanent loss
SEC announced that liquid staking tokens aren’t securities
DeFi App launched the mobile beta of its crypto everything app
Ventuals announced plans to enable trading startups before they IPO on Hyperliquid
US White House is preparing an executive order to fine banks that discriminate against crypto companies
Sonic released an updated airdrop checker that includes more eligible users
Meteora, the popular Solana DEX, released its airdrop checker
Fluid released Fluid DEX Lite on the mainnet. DEX Lite is expected to generate $200M–$400M in daily volume in a few months after all integrations are completed
Falcon Finance launched its Kaito yapper leaderboard
Linea partnered with Lido to stake all the ETH bridged to Linea L2
CoW DAO launched seamless Cross-Chain Swaps. This product is powered by Bungee
GTE exchange announced they’re leaving the MegaETH ecosystem
That’s all for this week!
Until next time,
The DeFi Investor
Want to sponsor this newsletter?
Please send me a DM on Twitter (X). I have a sponsorship deck that I can send you.