The total value locked (TVL) in the lending DeFi project Venus has reached $10.4 billion.
The next-largest TVL project on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) is PancakeSwap. Its smart contracts hold crypto assets worth $8 billion.
The total value locked in the BSC segment stands at $33.2 billion. This is about 61% of the current Ethereum-based ‘classic’ DeFi ecosystem, if tokenized bitcoins like WBTC and renBTC are not counted ($12.1 billion).
The momentum in the BSC ecosystem has largely been driven by the rapid rise in the price of the native token Binance Coin (BNB). In the last 30 days the coin has surged by more than 100%, climbing to third place in CoinGecko’s ranking. This has positively affected the value of many BEP-20 assets.
The revival of economic activity may also have been aided by a drop in the average gas price to around 10 Gwei. This reduced users’ transaction costs amid the rising price of BNB.
The surge in the demand for BSC ecosystem services is also reflected in the rapid growth of daily transaction counts.
Ethereum’s daily transaction count is about 3.5 times lower than that of Binance Smart Chain — 1.34 million versus 4.86 million transactions per day. This is largely due to the high gas costs and the ongoing scaling challenge facing the second-largest cryptocurrency.
Earlier Messari analyst Ryan Watkins called BSC nothing more than a centralized fork of Ethereum.
Case: Binance Smart Chain: why users choose low fees over decentralization
Subscribe to ForkLog’s channel on YouTube!