Hedera Hashgraph DeFi TVL nears record high but there’s a catch

Hedera Hashgraph’s HBAR token price has joined the ongoing altcoin season as demand for the token continued. HBAR price surged to a high of $0.9195, its highest point since February 19th. It has soared by more than 155% from its lowest point this year. This jump has given it a market cap of over $3 billion.

Hedera’s rally is mostly because of the ongoing Bitcoin and altcoin rally. Bitcoin surged to over $43,000 on Wednesday and some analysts believe it could hit $100k ahead of next year’s halving. In most cases, Bitcoin tends to do well towards and after halving. We saw that happen in April 2021 when the coin surged to a record high.

There are other catalysts. Inflation in most developed countries is falling, raising the possibility of rate cuts in 2024. In the UK, the headline inflation dropped below 4% in November and there is a likelihood that this trend will continue.

Meanwhile, there is rising possibility that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will approve a spot Bitcoin ETF. The SEC, Blackrock, and Nasdaq held another meeting this week to discuss the whole process.

Hedera Hashgraph is also rising because of its the performance of its decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. Data by DeFi Llama shows that the network’s TVL has risen to more than $52 million. In HBAR terms, the TVL has risen to 644.5 million tokens, a few points below its all-time high.

While this is a good things, there is a catch about Hedera’s DeFi ecosystem. First, most of the assets locked in its platform are in one main dApp: SaucerSwap. The Decentralized Exchange (DEX) has a TVL of more than $50 million. It handled over $653k in volume on Thursday.

The challenge with this is that Hedera has been overtaken by many newer blockchain networks like Base, Sui, PulseChain, and Aptos. This is even though Hedera has a much bigger market cap than all these networks.

On the positive side, on-chain metrics show that the Hedera Hashgraph network is quite popular among users. The number of created accounts in the network have risen to over 2.67 million while the active accounts stand at 1.37 million. Hedera has handled over 32.7 billion transactions with an average time of 1,000 transactions per second (tps).

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