DeFi TVL Surpasses $100B as Bitcoin Boosts Market Sentiment

The demand for Bitcoin is driving sentiment around the crypto industry, fueling the capital locked on-chain to surpass $100 billion on March 9.

Based on data from DefiLlama, the global total value locked (TVL) in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols has reached $100.1 billion, with a 24-hour trading volume of over $10 billion at the time of writing. However, these numbers still fall short of the record high of $189 billion set in November 2021.

Leading the charts is the liquid staking protocol Lido, with $38.7 billion locked on-chain, followed by the staking ecosystem EigenLayer and the Aave protocol with over $11 billion locked, respectively.

This is the first time in nearly two years that DeFi TVL has exceeded the $100 billion mark. The increase is likely due to the return of positive sentiment to the crypto markets since the launch of spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in January.

The institutional demand for spot Bitcoin ETFs has driven the cryptocurrency to new all-time highs this week, reaching $70,000 on March 8. According to BitMEX Research, assets in Bitcoin ETFs have surged to $28 billion on March 8. This analysis excludes assets from Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust, which was converted to an ETF in January from an over-the-counter (OTC) product.

Rumors are circulating on social media platform X about OTC trading platforms running out of Bitcoin and turning to public exchanges to fulfill orders from clients. These OTC desks primarily cater to large-volume traders, such as institutional investors.

Several centralized crypto exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, and Bybit, experienced outages after Bitcoin reached $60,000 due to increased trading volume. In response, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek stated that the exchange has hired 480 more customer representatives to handle the surge in demand.

“Due to the high retail interest and fast-moving price action, all of the algorithmic trading firms are significantly increasing the rate of order placements and cancellations they send to the matching engine to maintain their positions,” explained Ivo Crnkovic-Rubsamen, chief strategy officer and technical lead for trading at dYdX exchange, in an interview with Cointelegraph.

The Impact of Bitcoin on Memecoins

The recent surge in Bitcoin’s value has sparked a significant increase in the prices of memecoins. According to data from Bitget Research, Korra (KORRA) has experienced a staggering 577% rise in the last week, followed by Ribbit (RIBBIT) with a 235% surge and PUG AI (PUGAI) with a 232% jump during the same period.

Other popular tokens, including Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Pepe (PEPE), have also seen significant gains of 168% and 165%, respectively. As a result, the total market capitalization of memecoins currently stands at $61 billion, as reported by Bitget.

This trend has also led to the rise of Dogecoin (DOGE) and SHIB as top 1 tokens by market cap, with $26 billion and $20 billion, respectively.