The demand for Bitcoin is fueling sentiment around the crypto industry, driving the capital locked on-chain to over $100 billion on March 9.
According to data from DefiLlama, the global total value locked (TVL) in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols reached $100.1 billion, with more than $10 billion in volume in the past 24 hours at the time of writing. However, these figures still fall short of the $189 billion record set in November 2021.
Liquid staking protocol Lido is leading the charts with $38.7 billion locked on-chain, followed by the staking ecosystem EigenLayer and the Aave protocol with over $11 billion locked, respectively.
DeFi total value locked on March 9, 2024. Source: DefiLlama
This is the first time in nearly two years that DeFi TVL has exceeded the $100 billion mark. The increase appears to be due to a return of positive sentiment to the crypto markets since the launch of spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in January.
The institutional demand for spot Bitcoin ETFs drove the cryptocurrency to new all-time highs this week, topping $70,000 on March 8. According to BitMEX Research, assets in Bitcoin ETFs surged to $28 billion on March 8. The analysis excludes assets from Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust, which was converted to an ETF in January from an over-the-counter (OTC) product.
Rumors have circulated on social media platform X about OTC trading platforms running out of Bitcoin and turning to public exchanges to fulfill orders from clients. OTC desks typically cater to large-volume traders, such as institutional investors.
Several centralized crypto exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase, Kraken and Bybit, experienced outages after Bitcoin reached $60,000 due to increased trading volume. Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said the exchange hired 480 more customer representatives to handle the surge in demand.
“Because there’s so much retail interest and the price action is moving so fast, all of the algorithmic trading firms are vastly increasing the rate of order placements and cancels they want to send to the matching engine to maintain their positions,” Ivo Crnkovic-Rubsamen,…
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