In the past 24 hours, decentralized exchanges – cryptocurrency trading venues dependent on smart contracts and not intermediaries – saw their third-largest day of trading volume as a result of the recent volatility that saw wide price fluctuations such as Solana dipping over 30% before regaining another 30% in August.
According to DefiLlama’s most recent data, decentralized exchanges (DEXs) saw over $18.2 billion in trading volume in the past 24 hours, the third most active day in DeFi’s history trailing March 10, 2023’s nearly $24.5 billion and May 18, 2021’s $24.6 billion.
Silicon Valley Bank, a federally insured member of the Federal Reserve System, shut down around March 10, 2023, two days after Silvergate Bank announced it was winding down its operations. One day after May 18, 2021, BTC crashed 30%.
Uniswap, native to Ethereum and its auxiliary L2 networks, led the pack with a trading volume of $7.5 billion with BNB Chain’s leading DEX PancakeSwap coming in second place with a figure of nearly $1.8 billion. Phoenix and Orca, two Solana trading venues, took third and fourth place respectively, collectively responsible for roughly $2.5 billion in volume. In fifth place was Aerodrome, a trading platform solely on Coinbase’s L2 network Base.
The increased trading volume in the different ecosystems of the crypto space boosts the profit of liquidity providers, which are wallet addresses, typically controlled by people, bots, and entities, that deposit cryptoassets into smart contracts enabling the protocol to facilitate trades.
Read More: Uniswap Foundation Reveals Assets and Fund Usage Ahead of Fee Switch Vote
Uniswap, PancakeSwap, Phoenix, Orca, and Aerodrome each charge a fee from every transaction, in which the fees, through some mechanism, are allocated to liquidity providers. Per Uniswap’s documentation, the protocol takes a 0.3% fee for swapping tokens, while traders on PancakeSwap pay a 0.25% fee for their trade.
Uniswap’s UNI, PancakeSwap’s CAKE, Orca’s ORCA, and Aerodrome’s AERO – tokens tied to the governance structure of the exchanges – all jumped within the past 24 hours, per CoinGecko. Phoenix has not launched a token.
Setting the pace is ORCA, which jumped 33% from roughly $1.90 in the past 24 hours to trade at about $2.50 at presstime. The remaining three each increased more than 5% in the same time period, giving Uniswap, Pancake Swap, and Aerodrome a cumulative market cap of $5.1 billion.
The price movement of the governance tokens comes as the market cap of the total crypto ecosystem recovered, growing 2.8% on a 24-hour basis to a total valuation of nearly $2.07 trillion at the time of writing, per CoinGecko.
