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DeFi leader DAI now up to $1 million market cap

Photo of: Joseph Stone
by Joseph Stone

MakerDAO can be satisfied. Its stablecoin, the dai (DAI), now has a total capitalization of one billion dollars. “One billion dai in circulation is a significant milestone,” says the leading player in DeFi.

Two stable corners in dollars are certainly the law. They are the Tether (USDT) and the USDC of Circle. The market capitalization of the first reached 17 billion dollars this week. It was just 4 billion in January 2020.

But the USDC is not to be outdone, as is the dai of MakerDAO. The stablecoin also reaches a new high of 1 billion dollars. With a value of 1 dollar per token (or even slightly more), the stablecoin now has 1 billion tokens.

“One billion dai in circulation is a significant milestone and a powerful validation that people around the world want more access, more transparency and more opportunities to maximize their economic potential,” said MakerDAO’s boss.

This step is undoubtedly explained by the growing interest in DeFi in recent days. The total value of funds (TVL) committed to decentralized finance platforms is indeed 13.7 billion dollars.

The DAI is created “when Ethereum users deposit one of the many assets in the Maker protocol and borrow against this asset in the form of a DAI”.

According to DeFi Pulse, Maker now claims a total value of $2.38 billion. This makes it DeFi’s second protocol after Uniswap in terms of LPT. And since the beginning of November, this indicator has grown by more than $300 million.

“Dai is a pioneer in protocol-based financial instruments – and reaching the billion dai milestone proves that it works, and is here to stay,” commented the founder of another major DeFi protocol, Compound.

As a sign that 2020 is the year of the explosion of DeFi and its tokens, the value of this market exceeded one billion dollars in February. Now, the DAI alone weighs such an amount. And cryptocurrency, with the DeFi’s collateral system, is now an essential instrument.

Other players also covet such a place in decentralized finance. This is notably the case of Tezos, as well as other blockchains that want to take away Ethereum’s first place. Through the Delphi update, Tezos Blockchain announces that it will reduce gas consumption by approximately 75%.

This means lower transaction costs, which could attract DeFi protocols that often face Ethereum saturation and problematic costs. The CEO of the FTX exchange recently drove the nail in.

For Sam Bankman-Fried, Ethereum is simply not up to DeFi. The network is thus unable to support the growth of decentralized finance, says the creator of the Serum project.