This occurs following the weekend de-pegging incident of USDC by Circle.
March 11th was the day when Uniswap’s volume was the largest ever, at $11.84B.
This past weekend saw a surge in trading activity for USDC across many decentralized exchanges. The 11th of March was the day when Uniswap’s volume was the largest ever, at $11.84 billion. Yet, it isn’t the first decentralized protocol to gain popularity.
This occurs following the weekend de-pegging incident of USDC by Circle, which followed the failures of Signature, Silvergate, and Silicon Valley Bank.
Binance, Coinbase, Crypto.com, and Bitpay, among others, have all temporarily suspended stablecoin payments and automated conversions. When investors flocked to decentralized exchanges to trade USDC for wrapped ether and other tokens, the price of stablecoins fluctuated dramatically, and gas costs skyrocketed.
DeFi Gaining Popularity
Dune Analytics reports that the USDC pools for wrapped ether (WETH), USDT, and DAI have amassed $15 billion in volume since the beginning of the week. Because of the surge in users on that one day, Uniswap’s transaction fees soared to $8.7 million, a record high for the last 10 months.
The most popular stablecoin swapping exchange, Curve Finance, had its highest daily trading volume ever of approximately $8 billion and generated $952k in fees. At this same time frame, SushiSwap saw a spike in use and quickly became one of the most used smart contracts among the largest Ethereum whales.
The use of smart contracts to facilitate financial transactions directly between users has led to explosive development in the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry during the last several years. With two major breakdowns in the same year, public confidence in centralized bodies is at an all-time low. On the other side, this has led to a resurgence in the popularity of DeFi.