The popularity of DeFi’s yield farming is often compared to the initial coin offerings [ICO] boom of 2017 due to the laws of supply and demand. A couple of months later, this space has continued to garner not only significant attention but its success has spawned several new kinds of tokens and offerings among other things.
This was revealed in the latest edition of CoinGecko’s report which stated,
“Yield Farming paved the way for food tokens, insurance, and forks”
According to the report, as yield farming became more and more popular, along with it, the demand for insurance on established protocols also gained significant traction. For instance, Nexus Mutual noted a staggering rise of +375% in terms of the Total Value Locked [for insurance] in the month of August. The TVL figures currently stood near $80 million.
It is important to note that, Nexus Mutual insurance surpassed $200 million in active coverage in tandem with the growing liquidity and demand for smart contract insurance. A major chunk of the surge was driven by the incentive for liquidity mining of SAFE tokens. However, the lack of incentive after mining and a bizarre mistake by the devs caused SAFE to dump 96%, which then further dragged the value of its native token, NXM, down as well.
In terms of food-themed projects, CoinGecko revealed YAM Finance continued to dominate the charts after launching as an experiment and drawing in millions of dollars. It was YAM, that paved the way for several food-themed projects. Despite the popularity, Yield Farming appears to be sink. Along the same line, the report claimed,
“The Yield Farming trend appears to be cooling down, though liquidity still remains strong. Uniswap continues to support significant trading volumes. Stablecoin swap protocol, Curve and lending platform, Aave still holds billions of dollars worth of locked collateral.”
In September itself, there was significant growth of attention and content in the non-fungible tokens space, which led to an increased demand for NFTs. With respect to Total Sale in Rarible [in USD], the figure noted an increase of 5200%. The report further stated that while NFT is currently the hot topic, it was, however, still lacking a key catalyst that will eventually push it into mainstream interest, as it is slightly more difficult than ERC-20 tokens to get into.
