Against the backdrop of activation of the Shapella hard fork in the Ethereum network, total value locked (TVL) in the smart contracts of decentralized applications rose in April above $90 billion — the first time since September 2022, according to a ForkLog report.
For the month, the figure nevertheless edged down to $83.37 billion. Ethereum remained the leader, accounting for almost 67%.
Liquid staking protocols first surpassed decentralized exchanges in their share of total DeFi TVL. Projects in this category accounted for more than 21% or $17.78 billion in April. The metric rose 7% since March.
Top DeFi projects by locked-in funds were: Lido ($11.76 billion), MarketDAO ($7.32 billion), Aave ($6.96 billion), Curve Finance ($4.61 billion) and Uniswap ($3.59 billion).
However, despite the TVL rise, the prices of most DeFi assets moved into the red. Solar (SXP) posted the worst performance, with its price down by nearly 41%.
The PancakeSwap token (CAKE) also fell by 31%, despite a series of major announcements. In particular, the team presented the third version of the protocol and proposed to shift the project’s tokenomics to a deflationary model.
On-chain activity is led by the Tron network. In April the blockchain processed an average of 8.4 million transactions per day, almost 20% higher than March.
Notably, the L2 solution Arbitrum surpassed Ethereum in average daily transactions — 1.2 million to 1.0 million.
In late April, analysts at Dune recorded a record weekly inflow of assets into the Ethereum deposit contract following the activation of Shapella.