DeFi Tokens Defy the Dip as Ethereum Slips Below $1,300

Defy­ing a broad­er mar­ket down­turn sparked by the Fed’s inter­est rate hike, lead­ing decen­tral­ized finance (DeFi) tokens have post­ed gains over the past 24 hours.

UNI, the token behind decen­tral­ized exchange (DEX) Uniswap, is up over 8% in the past 24 hours, lead­ing the gains among the top 20 cryp­tocur­ren­cies by mar­ket cap.

At time of pub­li­ca­tion, UNI is chang­ing hands at around $5.80, with a whop­ping 55% increase in trad­ing vol­ume to $130 million.

With a mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion of slight­ly above $4.4 bil­lion, UNI is the 19th-largest cryp­tocur­ren­cy, accord­ing to data from Coin­Mar­ket­Cap.

Despite today’s price action, UNI is down 87% from its all-time high of $44.97 record­ed in May 2021.

LDO, the token pow­er­ing pop­u­lar Ethereum stak­ing plat­form Lido, has also gained over 6.7% in the last 24 hours and cur­rent­ly trades at around $1.89, per data from Coin­Mar­ket­Cap.

The 67th-largest cryp­tocur­ren­cy by mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion, LDO, is down over 80% from its his­tor­i­cal all-time high of $11 in Novem­ber 2021.

COMP, the gov­er­nance token pow­er­ing decen­tral­ized lend­ing pro­to­col Com­pound, post­ed gains of 4.5% over the day and cur­rent­ly trades at around $55.60, accord­ing to Coin­Mar­ket­Cap.

DeFi, crypto, and the Fed

The pri­ma­ry dri­ver behind the cryp­to market’s bear­ish price action is the U.S Fed­er­al Reserve’s deci­sion to hike inter­est rates by 0.75% (or 75 basis points) announced yesterday.

The over­all mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion of all cryp­tocur­ren­cies has dropped by 0.04% to $919.45 bil­lion over the past 24 hours, per data from CoinMarketCap.

Lead­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cies Bit­coin and Ethereum have post­ed sig­nif­i­cant week­ly loss­es, with Bit­coin drop­ping by over 5%. Ethereum, mean­while, dropped more than 20% over the past sev­en days, and is now trad­ing at under $1,300.

Ethereum (ETH) is on a con­tin­u­ous down­trend fol­low­ing its much-antic­i­pat­ed merge last week. ETH’s investors saw their wealth drop by near­ly 21% since the merge, accord­ing to data from Coin­Mar­ket­Cap.

Of the $332 mil­lion liq­ui­dat­ed in the cryp­to mar­ket over the past 24 hours, Ethereum, the largest liq­ui­dat­ed asset, accounts for over $148 mil­lion, per data from Coin­glass.

Despite the broad­er cryp­to mar­ket slip­ping in the wake of the Fed’s rate hike, DeFi tokens are on a tear, with their total mar­ket cap up over 30% to $45.89 bil­lion over the past day, per Coin­Mar­ket­Cap.

Over the past day, trad­ing vol­ume for DeFi tokens has also jumped over 30% to $5.4 billion.