Ethereum's DeFi Ecosystem Grows To 3M User Addresses As Crypto Trading Volume Plummets

The number of Ethereum ETH/USD addresses that interacted with decentralized finance (DeFi) systems reached 3 million this month.

What Happened: According to Dune Analytics charts, 3,004,620 addresses used at least one of the 24 DeFi decentralized applications (DApps), tracked by the company providing the data.

Dune Analytics also shows charts for leading DeFi protocols, including Uniswap UNI/USD, CompoundCOMP/USD, 1Inch 1INCH/USD, SushiSwap SUSHI/USD, Kyber Network KNC/USD, MakerDAO MKR/USD, Aave AAVE/USD, 0x ZRX/USD Synthetix SNX/USD and BancorBNT/USD.

What It Means: Uniswap is the most popular one by far, with 2.362 million interacting addresses so far, which is arguably justified as being the top DeFi coin with a market cap of nearly $11 billion.

This ecosystem also shows impressive growth, considering that it only had 691,000 interacting addresses at the beginning of the year.

Decentralized lending protocol Compound is the second most popular protocol according to this metric, saw over 325,000 Ethereum addresses interact with it. Its growth is much slower compared to Uniswap since it only gained about 25,000 addresses since the beginning of the year.

While undoubtedly a worthwhile metric to check when studying the trends of the DeFi space, interacting addresses do not necessarily represent the user count.

Read also: Ethereum Could Replace Bitcoin As The Dominant Store Of Value, Says Goldman Sachs

What Else: Although the near totality of the addresses is usually used by only one person, users often have multiple addresses. Especially tech-savvy and privacy-conscious users tend to change on-chain addresses often to improve their financial privacy, often using each one even one single time.

Despite this, the metric still shows a clear explosive growth in DeFi adoption.

What's even more notable is that this growth is continuing despite a recent CNBC report that trading volumes at the largest cryptocurrency exchanges such as Coinbase COIN, Kraken, Binance, and Bitstamp, fell more than 40% in June: the volumes are still much higher than they were a year ago.

Price Action: According to CoinMarketCap data, Ethereum price is currently at $1,925, losing 4.67% of its value over the last 24 hours.

Despite the growth in the ranks of its DeFi users, the coin is still over 54% down from its high of $4,329 reported in mid-May.