Trading volumes on decentralized exchanges hit an all-time high of $1.52 billion in June—up 70% on the month before, according to Dune Analytics.
The considerable uptick in demand follows a trend that we have seen with DEXs throughout 2020: trading volumes have been consistently higher this year when compared with the last.
Against January 2020, June’s trading volumes were up almost 450%.
This is only the second time that trading volumes have breached that elusive $1 billion barrier—the first was back in March.
What’s driving this?
A deep dive into Dune Analytics’ data shows that two decentralized exchanges were primarily responsible for June’s surge. The lion’s share of activity—53% to be precise—came from two platforms: Uniswap and Curve.
Uniswap is a decentralized protocol which allows ERC-20 tokens and ETH to be interchanged with ease. Curve is more focused on stablecoins, and aims to offer less expensive conversions than other DEXs.
June’s blockbuster performance came as the decentralized finance sector came into its own. The biggest star of the show was Compound, which has seemingly come from nowhere to overtake MakerDAO as the world’s biggest DeFi protocol.
Up-to-date figures from DeFi Pulse shows that the total value locked in the Compound protocol is $599 million—substantially more than Maker’s $484.7 million.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite a flawless month for the DeFi industry. On Monday morning, Balancer fell victim to a sophisticated hack that saw the attacker dupe the platform out of $500,000.
In a blog post, the DEX aggregator 1inch said: “The person behind this attack was very sophisticated smart contract engineer with extensive knowledge and understanding of the leading DeFi protocols. The attack was organized and well prepared in advance.”
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