The demand for Bitcoin is fueling sentiment around the crypto industry, driving the capital locked on-chain to over $100 billion on March 9.
According to data from DefiLlama, the global total value locked (TVL) in decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols reached $100.1 billion, with more than $10 billion in volume in the past 24 hours at the time of writing. However, these figures still fall short of the $189 billion record set in November 2021.
Liquid staking protocol Lido is leading the charts with $38.7 billion locked on-chain, followed by the staking ecosystem EigenLayer and the Aave protocol with over $11 billion locked, respectively.
This is the first time in nearly two years that DeFi TVL has exceeded the $100 billion mark. The increase appears to be due to a return of positive sentiment to the crypto markets since the launch of spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in January.
The institutional demand for spot Bitcoin ETFs drove the cryptocurrency to new all-time highs this week, topping $70,000 on March 8. According to BitMEX Research, assets in Bitcoin ETFs surged to $28 billion on March 8. The analysis excludes assets from Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust, which was converted to an ETF in January from an over-the-counter (OTC) product.
Rumors have circulated on social media platform X about OTC trading platforms running out of Bitcoin and turning to public exchanges to fulfill orders from clients. OTC desks typically cater to large-volume traders, such as institutional investors.
Several centralized crypto exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase, Kraken and Bybit, experienced outages after Bitcoin reached $60,000 due to increased trading volume. Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said the exchange hired 480 more customer representatives to handle the surge in demand.
“Because there’s so much retail interest and the price action is moving so fast, all of the algorithmic trading firms are vastly increasing the rate of order placements and cancels they want to send to the matching engine to maintain their positions,” Ivo Crnkovic-Rubsamen, chief strategy officer and technical lead for trading at dYdX exchange, told Cointelegraph.
Bitcoin drives capital into memecoins
Bitcoin’s gains sparked a surge in memecoin prices in recent days. According to data compiled by Bitget Research, memecoin Korra (KORRA) has seen a 577% rise in the last seven days, followed by a 235% surge for Ribbit (RIBBIT) and a 232% jump for PUG AI (PUGAI) in the same period.
Popular tokens, such as Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Pepe (PEPE), have seen gains of 168% and 165%, respectively. Memecoin market capitalization stands at $61 billion at the time of writing, according to Bitget data.
Due to the memecoin trend, Dogecoin (DOGE) and SHIB are now among the top 1 tokens by market cap, with $26 billion and $20 billion, respectively.
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