Monthly number of unique DeFi users worldwide up to April 2024

Decentralized Finance users reached a peak of 7.5 million unique users in late 2021, whereas figures in 2023 are considerably lower. This according to a network crawling code that tries to measure the number of unique user addresses involved in buying or selling specific projects associated with DeFi. For example, the code lists data fetching commands associated with Uniswap and Aave — two DeFi protocols with a market cap that was higher than one billion U.S. dollars in March 2022. As Decentralized Finance — much like cryptocurrencies or NFTs — are not being tracked by an official government, these procedures try to measure "network activity". Such activity on the Ethereum blockchain/network, the most used blockchain for DeFi, or elsewhere — tend to be the only source of information on the market size of these topics. However, the source does acknowledge the numbers shown are not without their potential flaws.DeFi in 2023 is relatively small-scaleOften remarked as a potential breakthrough trend for 2024, the TVL (total value locked) of DeFi in 2023 reveals a market that is much smaller than in 2021. The amount of money stored in Decentralized Finance was worth about 50 billion U.S. dollars by November 2023, compared to 175 billion U.S. dollars at the end of 2021. Two reasons can be named for this decline. First, the overall cryptocurrency markets has witnessed several dramatic moments. Prices declined after the crash of stablecoin LUNA, and the sudden collapse of crypto exchange FTX in 2022. In 2023, the United States government handed out one of its largest ever corporates fines to Binance — the world's largest crypto exchange. Second, analysts believe the high yield on U.S. Treasury bonds in 2023 when compared to DeFi yields negatively impacted the young industry — as these bonds pose lower risk than DeFi.DeFi use cases: Supporting crypto investmentsDecentralized Finance hopes to offer different digital financial services, which are run by a community in a so-called decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) away from banks or governments. These services can include asset management, money lending, or trading, potentially making it possible to offer services that traditional finance cannot do. By late 2023, however, DeFi focused on two main use cases: Liquid staking and money lending. These processes are there to support crypto investors, specifically. The market size of insurance within Decentralized Finance, for example, was much smaller in comparison.

去中心化金融用户在2021年底达到了750万独立用户的峰值，而2023年的数据则显著降低。这一数据来源于一种网络爬虫代码，旨在测量参与购买或出售与去中心化金融（DeFi）相关特定项目的独特用户地址数量。例如，该代码列出了与Uniswap和Aave相关的数据获取命令——这两家DeFi协议在2022年3月的市值均超过10亿美元。由于去中心化金融——类似于加密货币或NFT——并未受到官方政府的追踪，这些程序试图衡量所谓的“网络活动”。在以太坊区块链/网络，这是DeFi最常用的区块链，或其他地方进行的此类活动，往往是这些领域市场规模信息的唯一来源。然而，来源也承认，所展示的数字并非没有潜在的缺陷。2023年的DeFi相对规模较小，常被视作2024年可能实现突破性趋势的领域，但2023年DeFi的总锁定价值（TVL）揭示了其市场规模远小于2021年。截至2023年11月，存储在去中心化金融中的资金价值约为500亿美元，而截至2021年底为1750亿美元。造成这种下降的原因有两个。首先，整个加密货币市场经历了多次剧烈变动。在稳定币LUNA崩溃和加密交易所FTX突然倒闭之后，价格出现了下跌。2023年，美国政府向全球最大的加密交易所Binance开出了一项史上最大的公司罚款。其次，分析师认为，与美国国债的高收益率相比，DeFi的收益率在2023年对这一年轻行业产生了负面影响——因为这些债券的风险低于DeFi。去中心化金融的应用场景：支持加密投资去中心化金融旨在提供不同的数字金融服务，这些服务由一个社区在所谓的去中心化自治组织（DAO）中运行，远离银行或政府。这些服务可以包括资产管理、货币借贷或交易，可能使提供传统金融无法提供的服务成为可能。然而，到2023年底，DeFi主要聚焦于两个主要应用场景：流动质押和货币借贷。这些流程旨在特别支持加密投资者。例如，与去中心化金融中的保险市场相比，其市场规模要小得多。