Increasing interest in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) means that more investors are readily taking advantage of the profitable openings.
Bitcoin and ethereum are at the center of this attention, and more investors are seeing them as lucrative investment options and are buying them up at every dip.
Major Signals
- The total value locked in DeFi platforms stands at $30.25 billion.
- Currently, some 2,907,298 of ETH worth an amount of $4.39 billion, is staked on the network.
- Grayscale's total Ether holdings have increased by 242% over the past three months.
Due to the recent pandemic and its effects on the global economy, most countries are either in a recession, heading towards a recession, or negatively affected generally by the almost grinding to a halt of daily economic activities. Seeing the traditional investment opportunities tank around them, they started looking into alternative means of storing value.
With this came the rise of cryptocurrency, BTC hitting its ATH, and recently ETH reaching its ATH on Feb. 2nd. Amidst all of this, CryptoQuant, an on-chain data and analytics company shows that when Ethereum hit its ATH, the amount of ethereum on exchanges dropped to a new low as traders cashed out their profits.

Interest in Defi continues to soar, and as of February 3rd, the total value locked in DeFi platforms stands at $30.25 billion.
A large chunk of the DeFi platforms is built on Ethereum and requires it for transactions. Most of the activities are lending either for DeFi related purposes as it's seen to yield a more significant increase than trading with it.
The same scenario is playing out with bitcoin. Traders who are not interested in selling their bitcoin but preferably staking it long term are increasingly looking into ERC-20 synthetic versions of Ether.
According to information from Eth2 LaunchPad, which commenced in Dec. 2020. There are presently 2,907,298 ETH worth an amount of $4.39 billion, staked on the network, amassing an estimated annual percentage rate (APR) of 9.2%.
There has been an increase in the adoption of cryptocurrency as a store of value and an investment opportunity for investors. We've seen investors interested in Bitcoin, and more recently, a large number of them have been invested in ethereum. Grayscale's total Ether holdings have increased by 242% over the past three months.
In its annual report of 2020, Coinbase also noted a similar result, with an increasing number of their institutional clients taking an interest in ETH due to its profitability.