Media
Venus, a decentralized marketplace for lenders and borrowers, has surged over the last seven days to become the leading decentralized finance (DeFi) dapp on BINANCE Smart Chain (BSC).
The DeFi platform has amassed an impressive $3.4 billion in transaction volume with a daily average of over $400 million coming from 2.4k unique active wallets.
BSC is a relatively new blockchain, developed by Binance. It launched in November 2020 and has attracted a large portion of its vast Binance user-base with fast transaction times and lower gas fees than Ethereum.
Daily transaction volume
Lower fees and faster transactions on BSC only serve half the story. Looking at the daily transaction volume for Venus over the last 2 weeks below we can a significant surge on the 14th January 2021. This coincided with the launch of the SFP token on BSC by SafePal – a Binance backed, tokenized hardware wallet.
The transaction volume surged to over $720 million on the 14th of January because until the end of January all XVS holders can take a share from a 5,000,000 SFP reward pool by finishing the holding XVS challenge within the SafePal mobile app.
Furthermore, the arrival of a simplified Chinese press release and an agreement with popular crypto wallet Swipe seemed to stimulate further increases from the 19th of January continuing.
Top BSC dapp
Venus’ dominance is clear to see when looking at the top 5 BSC DeFi dapps. The 2nd to 5th placed BSC DeFi dapps combined only generated $280 million in transaction volume in the last 7-days.
However, PancakeSwap is leading when it comes to daily active wallets. It is worth mentioning that the features of the two dapps are very different. PancakeSwap being a decentralized exchange whilst Venus is a marketplace for lenders and borrowers utilizing its own stablecoin VAI.
The protocol design of Venus Is based on Compound and MarkerDAO and synced into the Venus platform giving the benefits of both systems into one. Because of that, VAI is similar to MakerDAO’s DAI stablecoin.
Moreover, looking at similar high-ranking DeFi dapps on Ethereum such as Aave and Compound gives a fuller picture of Venus’s impressive growth. Looking at the number of unique active wallets over the last 7-days reveals that both Aave and Compound have decreased by 18% and 12% respectively.
Meanwhile, Venus grew by almost 35% to 2.5k. Almost two times that of Aave at the time of writing.
What is Venus?
Venus is an algorithmic-based money market system that enables users to utilize their cryptocurrencies by supplying collateral to the network that may be borrowed by pledging over-collateralized cryptocurrencies.
The difference of Venus from other money market protocols is the ability to use the collateral supplied to the market not only to borrow other assets but also to mint synthetic stablecoins with over-collateralized positions that protect the protocol.
WATCH – Jon Jordan first time use of Venus
Further Resources
Newsletter