Author | Ambcrypto Suzuki Shillsalot
Compile | PANews
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank caused the US dollar stablecoin USDC to break its anchor last weekend and once fell to a low of 0.87 US dollars. FUD sentiment is also spreading in the encryption market. However, the impact of this black swan event does not seem to be as great as expected. DEX (Decentralized exchanges) have even seen exponential growth in trading activity and fee revenue.
According to DeFiLlama data, on March 11, the total transaction volume of DEX soared to 15.12 billion US dollars, setting a new high in the past four months, with a weekly growth rate of more than 100%. The ratio of aggregated DEX and centralized exchange (CEX) transaction volume (this indicator reflects the market dominance of DEX) rose to 26.66%, the highest value since 2019.
Uniswap, Curve Finance, SushiSwap emerge as “big winners” during market uncertainty
For the encryption community, the decline of centralized entities is conducive to the development of DeFi, especially after the collapse of FTX, more and more users choose to abandon centralized exchanges and begin to explore self-custody. The recent “USDC crisis” caused by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank “It has accelerated this trend-data shows that DEXs such as Uniswap, Curve Finance, and SushiSwap achieved impressive growth last weekend.
First of all, as a DEX specially designed for stablecoin exchange, Curve Finance set a record of the highest single-day transaction volume of nearly 8 billion US dollars in the past 24 hours. According to CryptoFees data, due to the surge in transaction volume, the fee income collected on the Curve platform also jumped to $952,000, setting a new high in the past four months.
Followed by Uniswap, Uniswap is also one of the DEXs with the largest trading volume in the current encryption market. The trading volume of USDC soared to 3.45 billion US dollars within 24 hours after USDC was unanchored, marking the best performance in the past four months. Transaction fees paid by Uniswap users also rose to $8.75 billion as of this writing, hitting a 10-month high.
Another popular DEX is SushiSwap, which also saw a surge in activity during the USDC crisis and became one of the most used smart contracts by Ethereum whales.
However, according to DeFiLlama data, the average daily transaction volume of SushiSwap did not show a significant increase in the previous week. When this article was written, the transaction volume in the past 24 hours was 52.48 million US dollars, but dropped by 76.76%.
The future belongs to DEX and DeFi?
In the past 3-4 years, DEX has achieved rapid development. The data disclosed by Token Terminal shows that the number of active developers on the DEX platform has been growing steadily, indicating that the fundamentals supporting the future of DeFi are good.
On the other hand, as the Federal Reserve announced a new emergency bank term financing plan in the early hours of March 13, Beijing time and supported Silicon Valley Bank depositors to use funds on Monday local time, the USDC dollar anchor price rebounded and rose to the $0.995 range. The US dollar anchor has been basically restored, and its market value has returned to above US$40 billion.
It is believed that after this crisis, the encryption community will further understand the risks of centralized entities, and it is bound to choose DEX and DeFi more in the future.