25 Important Statistics About the DeFi Industry From 2022

On the other hand, DeFi projects have seen countless hacks and one of the most catastrophic meltdowns in tech/internet history with Terra. Together with the macro conditions, these factors have caused the DeFi market to drop significantly, even more than other blockchain sectors, in the past year.

On the other hand, you can’t have GameFi without DeFi, and NFT markets are increasingly integrating DeFi elements like staking and tokenization.

In the second half of the year, NFTs and GameFi outperformed DeFi in both public and investor interest. However, DeFi is far from dead. Although the vast majority of DeFi projects are no longer active (as this list will show), many protocols and classes have performed quite well, indicating – weathering the storm so far – that they are likely to survive the bear market and thrive in the future.

In the spirit of DYOR, we’ve rounded up the most important stats on DeFi from 2022, so you can look into the industry. By looking at the past, you can make smarter investments and analyzes in the future.

Table of Contents

9 stats on the DeFi market

Total TVL in DeFi fell from $267 billion at the beginning of January to $53 billion by the end of the year.

The DeFi crypto sector has had a tough year, one that started with a Fed rate hike, and was exacerbated by the Terra crash and continued hacks, crashes, and macro conditions.

Reference: DeFi TVL

The total number of DeFi protocols rose from 1,080 in January to a peak of 1,596 in September, before almost stagnating.

Note that not all of these protocols are active. As shown in stat 9, there are less than 100 currently active.

Reference: Monthly total number of DeFi protocols

The biggest crash in DeFi history occurred from May 4th to May 14th with the Terra crash

Terra Network was a tier one blockchain known for its high throughput and stable computational work, UST.

Reference: Terra dashboard

DEXs remained the largest type of DeFi protocol with 34% of total TVL, while lending protocols increased from 18% to 20%.

This is not surprising, given that DEXs play an important role in the DeFi infrastructure. Going forward, lending protocols will have a more difficult time given the consequences of over-leveraging in 2022.

Reference: Distribution of TVL in different categories (2021) And Distribution of TVL in different categories (Click to explore more)

The market capitalization of DeFi tokens peaked on April 3 at $243 billion, down 4% from its ATH ($253 billion) from a year earlier on December 3. 26

This statistic contains the market capitalization of DeFi tokens as the sum of the tokens issued by DeFi protocols. It does not include L1 and L2 tokens that are commonly used in DeFi, such as Ethereum and Solana.

Reference: DeFi Token Market Cap vs. BTC Market Cap

As of December. On the 31st, the market cap of DeFi tokens was $40.52 billion

By comparison, Bitcoin’s market capitalization on this date was $318.41 billion

Reference: DeFi Token Market Cap vs. BTC Market Cap

From the end of November to the beginning of December, BTC had its largest price correlation from the S&P 500 in recent history, reaching -0.83.

The Stock Market Correlation Index is measured on a scale of 1 to -1, where 1 indicates that both sets of prices always move in the same direction and -1 that they never move in the same direction.

Reference: 2022: Bitcoin and S&P 500 price correlation analysis

The Fear and Greed Index reached a yearly low on June 6 at 6 (extreme fear).

In comparison, it reached the 8-10 range in the immediate aftermath of Terra Luna’s collapse and stayed above 10 after the FTX crash.

Reference: 2022 Token price against F&G

The number of active DeFi projects decreased by 33% year-on-year

Active project is determined by Footprint Analytics Average daily active users in the last 5 days is greater than 100.