DeFi Boom: Balancer Echoes Compound With 235% Spike on First Day

DeFi tokens like LEND — the price of which has increased by 3900% since 2019 — rallied further this week, some to new all-time highs.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens from Balancer, Ben, Aave and Swissborg have all made huge gains, in the wake of excitement generated by the distribution of Compound’s governance token.

Less than twelve hours after Balancer announced its protocol governance token BAL was live on the Ethereum mainnet, and the price jumped from $6.65 to $22.28. At the time of writing, the DeFi token was trading at $15.60, with a little over 6 million BAL tokens in the circulating supply.

It’s following in the footsteps of COMP which more than tripled in value this week. Even after today’s price crash, it’s still up by 135%.

Souce: CoinGecko

LEND skyrockets, REN and SNX reach ATH

According to data from CoinMarketCap, altcoins Aave (LEND), Ren (REN), and Synthetix (SNX) also had strong rallies this week. 

LEND, a token from London-based DeFi lending platform Aave, has seen a 3,900% increase in price since trading under $0.01 for almost a year from November 2018 onwards. The token first rallied to $0.05 in May, then surged to $0.16 on June 21. 

Synthetix, a Australian leader in DeFi derivatives, and the newly launched REN, saw new all-time highs today. The price of SNX rose 40% this week continuing its bullish trend of a 100% increase over the last 30 days to reach an ATH of $1.61. 

Both tokens have been looking bullish since late March following the crypto bloodbath. On June 23, the price of REN reached $0.16, respectively, an increase of more than 400%.  

Source: CoinMarketCap

SwissBorg looking at all-time highs

Decentralized wealth management platform Swissborg’s CHSB token is currently trading at $0.14, having reached a new all-time high of just over $0.16 on June 17. For much of 2020, the price of the DeFi token was hovering around $0.02.  

Source: Coin360

Why are DeFi tokens doing better?

Cointelegraph has reported many DeFi tokens have consistently been outperforming Bitcoin (BTC) in 2020. Interest in these coins has been given a major boost by the launch of COMP, which has just started trading on Coinbase, and saw a meteoric price rise in its first week.

There is also considerable excitement around the concept of ‘yield farming’ which some publications including Forbes have promoted as a means to get a 100% return on an annualized basis.

As these tokens operate on the Ethereum mainnet, the expected introduction of Ethereum 2.0 later this year may fuel the bullish sentiment as it will enable DeFi projects to scale up properly. Some believe DeFi could rival the ICO boom in 2017 while others think it’s another overhyped bubble waiting to pop.