Prominent Crypto Exchanges Expand Services To Cater To Clients’ Interest In DeFi Boom

As DeFi projects continue to dominate conversations in the crypto community exchanges are adapting to accommodate the latest craze in the space.

Leading cryptocurrency spot and derivatives exchange OKEx has listed 21 tokens in the past 30 days, according to a recent announcement. The exchange highlighted that recent months have brought strong performance from the DeFi space. On Tuesday, September 1 the DeFi total market capitalization reached a record of $17.7 billion marking a stunning 250% increase from Saturday, August 1 when it stood at $6.87 billion, according to OKLink data.

In an effort to help clients get in on the explosive growth, the exchange has listed 35 DeFi tokens, 21 of which were listed in the past 30 days. One of the projects which has stolen the spotlight over recent weeks is yearn.finance, an automated DeFi yield farming protocol, which launched a new yvault strategy on Wednesday, September 2. The strategy allows users to deposit funds and have them automatically sent to liquidity pools where there are token rewards and high-yield opportunities. Just one day after its launch the vault already had $139 million worth of Ether committed despite the high risk associated with the investment. OKEx CEO Jay Hao cautioned platform users to proceed with caution when exploring DeFi investments.

“We encourage investors to maintain the same diligent standards and hope that all traders’ investment decisions are also based on project understanding and rational analysis,” he stated.

OKEx will also be listing UMA, a project which builds open source infrastructure to build financial contract designs which allow users to create synthetic tokens. The second component of UMA is a data verification mechanism. On September 1, UMA overtook yearn.finance as the largest DeFi protocol on Ethereum with a $1.3 billion market cap, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Yearn.finance sits in the fourth position on the list of top DeFi tokens by market cap with $824,166,341.

OKEx is not the only exchange catering to the crypto community’s current infatuation with DeFi. Binance announced a new trading platform which it claims allows users to reap the benefits of DeFi services. The swap feature allows clients to pool tokens for instant liquidity and offers USDT/BUSD, BUSD/DAI and USDT/DAI.

“This is an automated market maker (AMM) pool product, the first of its kind in a centralized exchange, and it hosts different pools of liquidity that allow its users to exchange crypto assets,” the announcement read.

In June, popular crypto exchange Coinbase also announced support for one of the original DeFi projects Compound allowing clients to buy, sell, convert, send or store COMP.

DeFi is growing fast and new projects are gaining popularity quickly. Data from CoinMarketCap shows that six projects — UMA, yearn.finance, Aave, Maker, Synthetix and Compound — are now above $500 million in valuation.

By Emily Mason​