According to a new quarterly report by ConsenSys on decentralized finance, the Ethereum (ETH) network continues to be a major force behind decentralized finance, or DeFi. This is a continuation of a trend that began around the middle of the year 2020 and is expected to continue indefinitely.
By the end of June 2021, the number of unique Ethereum addresses interacting with at least one DeFi protocol had increased to 2.91 million, a 65 percent increase over the previous quarter of 2018. According to the report, the number of new addresses increased during the quarter as a result of increased community-driven education, simple user interfaces, appealing yields, and general awareness about DeFi best practices.
ConsenSys expressed concern in a statement about the ease with which individuals can create and fund multiple cryptocurrency accounts, resulting in an imbalance between the number of addresses and their users.
However, MetaMask can be considered a secondary indicator for detecting trends in DeFi. By June 1, the number of MetaMask’s monthly active users had surpassed 7.3 million, according to ConsenSys, a cryptocurrency analytics firm. ConsenSys estimates that 8.5 million MetaMask users are active on a monthly basis at the time of writing. The report provides the following explanation:
“This is in part due to the growth of DeFi applications on other Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible networks that users can access via MetaMask, like BSC and Polygon.”
MetaMask, a cryptocurrency wallet developed by ConsenSys and released in 2016, quickly gained popularity among DeFi users and is now considered to be one of the community’s most widely used wallets.
The growing popularity of decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap, as well as the growing use of bitcoin, have also been attributed to the growing use of bitcoin.
Contrary to expectations, DeFi’s expansion has coincided with a significant increase in the number of Ethereum addresses.
According to data from Etherscan, the Ethereum network had more than 165 million unique addresses at the time of this writing, up from around 131 million at the start of the year, a new record high.
As a result, active DeFi addresses comprise less than 2% of all Ethereum addresses, a negligible fraction of all Ethereum addresses.
Another critical metric that ConsenSys uses to track the growth of DeFi is the supply of stablecoins, which is calculated in addition to the number of active addresses:
“Stablecoin supply continued to grow at a rapid pace in Q2 2021, now representing a total issuance of nearly $65 billion USD, up more than 60% since the end of Q1 2021.”
According to CoinMarketCap, Tether (USDT) held a 48 percent share of the stablecoin market on the Ethereum blockchain at the end of the second quarter. The decline from around 58 percent at the end of the first quarter indicates that USDT’s major competitors are seeing increased usage.
The report also identifies a number of other significant themes, including the growth of decentralized exchanges, institutional investment in decentralized financial infrastructure, and the apparent growth of decentralized autonomous organizations.
Additionally, it discussed the growing importance of token governance and the pressing need to resolve the DeFi scaling issues that have arisen as a result of recent developments.
