DeFi Protocol Terra Records $21bln in TVL

A ‘Santa rally’ in cryptocurrency markets took off Friday when LUNA, the indigenous token of decentralised payments system Terra, surged to more than $100 during European trading hours. Traders profited on LUNA’s 10 percent dip to $85 on Thursday, bringing the stock once again to its prior peak of $96 in the initial Asian morning hours.

Following that, a statement by cryptocurrency exchange Binance that it would offer UST, a stablecoin created on the Terra platform, sent LUNA past the $100 mark. At that point, the price encountered resistance and fell by 5 cents at the time of publication.

According to statistics from analytical tool DeFi Llama, increasing cryptocurrency prices have enabled the total value locked (TVL) in Terra decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols to surpass the $21 billion mark, making it the second biggest DeFi ecosystem behind Ethereum.

The sum has increased by about $3 billion from its previous level of $18 billion on Wednesday. Anchor, a stablecoin dependent yield-generating program, has a market capitalization of nearly $9 billion out of the total. When compared to the previous week, TerraSwap, a decentralized exchange created using Terra smart contracts, had an 81 percent increase in TVL to more than $2 billion.

For financial services like as lending, borrowing, and trading, DeFi covenants use smart contracts rather than intermediaries to facilitate the transaction. The total value is divided among 13 protocols, resulting in an average value of almost $1.6 billion per protocol. That contrasts with $73 million per covenant on Binance Smart Chain, the third-largest DeFi network, which has $17 billion frozen in 232 protocols and has a total of $17 billion locked up in a total of 232 protocols.

Some believe that apps such as Anchor increase Terra’s appeal to investors. Just like Marvin Steinberg of investment firm Steinberg Invest pointed out in a Telegram message with CoinDesk, “a 20% APY [annual percentage yield] on UST deposits via the Anchor Protocol is quite enticing because capital flows from far more risk-averse yield-bearing positions to much more risk-averse yield-bearing positions,” the Anchor Protocol offers “a 20% APY [annual percentage yield] on UST deposits through the Anchor Protocol.”

Its price gain is a portion of a bigger multi-month uptrend that has been boosted by improvements to its token protocols in November – including a ‘burn’ feature that reduces supply on as and when needed basis – and greater activity on Terra-based decentralized financing (DeFi) apps. With a market valuation of $36 billion, LUNA has risen to pushed its way up to become the ninth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.