BTC locked in DeFi increased by 20x the entire Lightning Network this week

Published at: Sept. 11, 2020

The amount of BTC locked in decentralized finance projects increased by more than 30% in the past week, despite falls in the price of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH).

USD’s total value locked, or TVL, can go up and down with markets, even in the absence of a change in the number of tokens locked. In the past week, the TVL dropped from its all-time high of $9.6 billion on Sept. 2 to $6.1 billion on Sept. 10 before climbing back to $7.8 billion.

According to DeFi tracking platform DefiPulse, the amount of locked BTC increased from 67,038 BTC ($694 million) on Sept. 2 to the current all-time high of 87,752 BTC ($904 million), representing an increase of 30.9%. That’s an increase equivalent to 20 times the BTC locked in the Lightning Network.

More than 50% (51,295 BTC) of the locked Bitcoin sits on Ethereum in WBTC, which accounted for 63% of the BTC growth since Sept. 2, locking an additional 13,000 WBTC on the network.

RenVM, which also allows users to tokenize their BTC on Ethereum, holds 17,630 BTC locked, growing by more than 2,500 BTC since the start of the month.

In contrast, Bitcoin’s Lightning Network accounts for only 1.2% (1,061 BTC) of the total BTC locked in DeFi. The BTC locked on the Lightning Network grew by just 4 BTC, or less than 0.02% of BTC’s total growth, so far in September.

The 198 BTC added to the Lightning Network since the start of the year represents a growth of 23% and is dwarfed by WBTC’s addition of over 50,000 BTC this year, representing growth of over 8600%.

Despite 600,000 Ether being removed from DeFi protocols, Bitcoin is still in a distant second place. It accounts for less than half the $2 billion USD value of Ethereum’s 5.6 million locked coins. In total, almost 5% of Ethereum’s circulating supply is now locked in DeFi.

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