Total DeFi TVL is off 16% from peak, but market players argue it's just a bump on the way to growth

The bears might have you believe it’s a down market for decentralized finance (DeFi) chains, with total value locked across all decentralized finance (DeFi) chains down from all time highs, but that hasn’t been true for most of the major protocols over the past week.

Of the top 100 chains, only 18 have lost value over the past seven days, according to DeFi Llama data. The rest, it appears, are riding a rising wave on the back of demand and early adopter enthusiasm.

Blockchain protocol Terra hit a new TVL peak on March 22 at $27.45 billion, rising over 68% from a month earlier, and Curve, a decentralized exchange liquidity pool on Ethereum, took the No. 1 spot in terms of TVL, seeing a 13.4% increase from a week ago to $20.41 billion.

Total value locked, or TVL, across all DeFi protocols is the sum of all staked crypto assets that are earning rewards, interest and so on.

The total amount locked on chains has dropped about 16% from a peak in early December 2021, but market players feel the DeFi space is still in its early stages and has room to grow.

“At a high level, TVL is a good indication of the trust that users have in the various DeFi protocols, namely the blue chip ones like Maker, Aave, Uniswap,” Derek Lim, head of crypto insights at crypto exchange Bybit said.

“It is also representative of the users’ recognition that DeFi protocols do have some substantive value-add. However, although TVL does paint a certain picture of the DeFi landscape, it doesn’t paint a full one.”