On the one hand, DeFi projects have had countless hacks and one of the most catastrophic crashes in tech/internet history with Terra. Combined with macroeconomic conditions, these factors led to a significant decline in the DeFi market, even more than in other blockchain sectors, last year.

On the other hand, you can’t have GameFi without DeFi, and NFT marketplaces are increasingly integrating DeFi elements like staking and tokenization.

In the second half of the year, NFT and GameFi overtook DeFi in public and investor interest. However, DeFi is far from dead. While the vast majority of DeFi projects have ceased to be active (as this list will show), several protocols and categories have performed well, indicating that they are likely to weather the storm and thrive in the future.

In the spirit of DYOR, we’ve compiled the most important DeFi statistics for 2022 to give you a glimpse into the industry. By looking back at the past year, you can make smarter investments and analyzes in the future.

9 DeFi market statistics

• Total TVL in DeFi dropped from $267 billion in early January to $53 billion by the end of the year.

The DeFi crypto sector has had a rough year, the decline of which began with Fed rate hikes exacerbated by the Terra crash and ongoing hacks, crashes and macro conditions.

Link: DeFi TVL

• The total number of DeFi protocols increased from 1,080 in January to a peak of 1,596 in September, after which it remained virtually unchanged.

Note that not all of these protocols are active. As can be seen from statistic 9, there are currently less than 100 active.

Link: Monthly Total DeFi Protocols

• The biggest crash in DeFi history occurred from May 4th to May 14th with the collapse of Terra.

The Terra Network was a Tier 1 blockchain known for its high yield and UST algorithmic stablecoin.

Link: Terra control panel

• DEXs remained the largest type of DeFi protocol with 34% of total TVL while lending protocols increased from 18% to 20%.

This is not surprising given that DEXs play an important role in the DeFi infrastructure. Lending protocols will have a harder time going forward, given the implications of overleveraging in 2022.

Link: TVL distribution by different categories (2021) And Distribution of TVL by different categories (click to learn more)

• The market capitalization of DeFi tokens peaked on April 3 at $243 billion, down 4% from its ATH ($253 billion) compared to the previous year on December 26.

This statistic shows the market capitalization of DeFi tokens as the sum of tokens issued by DeFi protocols. It does not include the L1 and L2 tokens commonly used for DeFi, such as Ethereum and Solana.

Link: DeFi Token Market Cap vs. BTC Market Cap

• As of December 31, the market capitalization of DeFi tokens was $40.52 billion.

In comparison, the market capitalization of BTC at that date was $318.41 billion.

Link: DeFi Token Market Cap vs. BTC Market Cap

• From late November to early December, BTC had the largest price decorrelation from the S&P 500 in recent history, reaching -0.83.

The stock market correlation index is measured on a scale from 1 to -1, where 1 means the two sets of prices always move in the same direction and -1 means they never move in the same direction.

Link: 2022: Analysis of the price correlation of BTC and S&P 500

• The Fear and Greed Index hit an annual low on June 6 at 6 (extreme fear).

In comparison, it reached the 8-10 range immediately after the Terra Luna crash and stayed above 10 after the FTX crash.

Link: 2022 VS F&G token price

• The number of active DeFi projects has decreased by 33% year on year.

An active project is defined as the average daily active users of Footprint Analytics over the past five days that is greater than 100.

Link: Active projects along the chain

6 DeFi Chain Statistics

• All of the top 10 TVL DeFi networks ended the year with fewer active DeFi protocols than at the start.

Active projects make up a tiny fraction of the total number of protocols, and most of them do not have any TVL.

Link: Active projects along the chain

• BNB has consistently had the most active projects throughout the year, ranging from 24 to 49, and the most active users, ranging from 150k to 550k.

With the world’s largest CEX, Binance, and the BNB smart chain, Binance is able to offer competitive ecosystem incentives and grants.

Link: Active projects along the chain

• As of the end of the year, Polygon ranks second in the number of active protocols with 12, while Ethereum has 8.

Polygon is a high performance EVM L2 solution in 2022 across multiple sectors of the blockchain industry, especially DeFi and gaming.

Link: Active projects along the chain

• Ethereum ranks 2nd in the number of protocols with 129.

The Ethereum network made DeFi possible and pioneered the industry. However, its congestion and high gas tariffs severely limit the possibilities of developers.

Link: Active projects along the chain

• At its peak on April 6, Terra had a TVL of $103.9 billion.

This figure made it the second largest network, surpassing BNB in ​​December. Note that Ethereum has consistently had the highest TVL

Link: On-chain TVL (except Ethereum)

• Ethereum had the highest TVL during the year, rising from $106.7B to $972.8B before falling again to $171.2B.

Link: TVL over network

• With the exception of Terra, Solana had the most significant percentage drop in TVL compared to ATH, dropping 96% from $16 billion to $600 million.

Solana had some promising GameFi and DeFi projects at the start of the year and looked like it could be a contender to overtake Ethereum. However, they were not sustainable.

Link: TVL over network

5 Statistics About DeFi Protocols

• UNI had the highest market capitalization of any DeFi protocol token.

UNI is the governance token of Uniswap, the largest and most popular DEX in the world. It is based on Ethereum.

Link: Market capitalization of tokens with the most protocols 5

• The only DeFi protocol token that increased year-on-year was IDO Lido, which rose from $247 million to $896 million.

Lido allows users to optimize the returns on their assets by tokenizing their deposits.

Link: Market capitalization of tokens with the most protocols 5

• DEX protocols account for 26% of total DeFi TVL.

Link: Share of DEX TVL

• Curve is the largest TVL protocol as of December 31 with $3.6 billion.

Curve is one of the first DeFi protocols to generate income from stablecoins.

Link: Share of DEX TVL

• USDT, also known as Tether, remained the largest stablecoin by market cap, holding $66.2 billion as of December 31st.

Tether is an asset-backed stablecoin that has been in controversy in 2022. However, despite USDC hitting $10 billion in TVL over the summer, USDT has since extended its lead.

Link: Top 5 stablecoins by market capitalization

4 DeFi investment statistics

• The largest funding round this year was Lithosphere Network’s $400 million seed round in May led by Gem Capital.

According to its website, Lithosphere “is a next-generation network for cross-chain decentralized applications based on artificial intelligence and deep learning.”

Link: DeFi Fundraising Statistics

• The huge Lithosphere round helped make January the biggest month by investment with $643 million.

Link: DeFi Fundraising Statistics

• January had the most 2022 rounds: 69.

Link: DeFi investment amount in 2022

• DeFi was the second most popular project type by funding round in both 2021 and 2022, but while DeFi accounted for 23% of the total round in 2021, it accounted for 18% in 2022.

Link: Structure of investment financing in 2021 and 2022 This part is provided Track analytics community Daniel, January 2023 Data source: DeFi industry statistics since 2022

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