If you look at the prices for example for Bitcoin (BTC) this past week, you may take a moment to gasp, as it has been lots of ups and downs. The week started at $48K, went up to a high of $52.6K, dropped down to $46.2K, and is ending the week where it started, back at $48K. Whew.
The price action can be nauseating to look at on a short-term scale, because of all the volatility. But when you take a more macro point of view, you see the cryptocurrencies for example the leader Bitcoin, have a steady increase as they gain more adoption and use-cases around the world, hence the store of value mantra.
Decentralized Finance
Although Bitcoin is the market leader, decentralized finance or DeFi, is taking the cryptocurrency world by storm. Fueled by the most popular network for DeFi, Ethereum, is where most decentralized applications (dapps) are being built on.
The DeFi market is doing well, despite a wider cryptocurrency market pullback. The total value locked in DeFi remains above $40 billion, thanks to Curve Finance, SushiSwap. and Balancer. At the same time, Bancor has added more than 11% to its total value locked.
But the shining star this week appears to be Uniswap (UNI). This week it went from a low of $22 and is ending the week strong at $27.
Non-Fungible Tokens
NFTs are also becoming very popular, which is another decentralized system built mainly on top of Ethereum as well.
Just last week OKEx announced that it listed FLOW, the popular NFT token used by NBA Top Shot. Also this week, Shark Tank star and venture capitalist Mark Cuban announced that he invested in the NFT platform called Mintable.
NFTs on Ethereum seems to be the hottest trend in DeFi at the moment, although NFTs aren’t contained to just the ETH network. It seems that other coins are also trying to hop on the NFT train. Bitcoin Cash (BCH), the digital payments cryptocurrency which originally stemmed from Bitcoin, is also getting into non-fungible tokens.
Ethereum fees
Although most of the news this week with DeFi is positive, which is helping to push along Ethereum, the ETH price isn’t doing as well as some may have hoped. It hit an ATH recently, but has dropped down and is struggling to recover. A major hinderance for ETH has been it’s rising gas fees, which is an ongoing issue.
was originally published in OKEx Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
