Alpaca Finance, a yield farming protocol built on the BINANCE Smart Chain has seen a surge in the number of users and transactions over the last 7-days taking it closer to $2 billion dollars in total value locked. Alpaca Finance should not be confused with Alpaca City, the NFT DeFi platform on Ethereum and Polygon.
Pioneered by Compound with the release of its COMP governance token during the ‘Summer of DeFi’, yield farming has become a popular way for projects to add liquidity and acquire new users.
In the last 7 days, the number of wallets interacting with the dapps smart contracts has swelled by over 100% up to over 11,000 while the number of transactions has increased over 145% to around 62,000 according to data from DappRadar.
A major driver of this activity is arguably the staking APYs available on Alpaca right now ranging anywhere between 100% to over 4,000% in certain pools. As discussed previously, liquidity battles are commonplace in the decentralized finance world and Alpaca appears to be aggressively going after market share with a host of mouth-watering offers for their users.
The surge places Alpaca Finance as the 6th ranked dapp on Binance Smart Chain over the last 7 days. Moreover, when compared to a more established dapp such as PancakeSwap we see that there is still a huge gulf in the number of users but that Alpaca Finance is generating impressive volume for a protocol that’s been in existence for just under three months.
DeFi on Binance
Q1 2021 was an exciting quarter for the blockchain industry and Binance Smart Chain. Lasting Ethereum congestion issues created a need for both developers and users to look for other options and BSCs’ early nurturing and dedication to its DeFi ecosystem paid off.
Recently, the BSC community made the network even more appealing to new users as a cost-effective and stable alternative, by lowering its gas fee from 15 Gwei to 10 Gwei to counter the price jump of the Binance Coin (BNB) in April 2021. At the end of March 2021, BSC gas fees were 14 times lower than on Ethereum.
Binance Smart Chain is continuing to impress as we head deeper into Q2. An expanding dapp ecosystem coupled with worldwide marketing efforts and even customer service outreach from CZ himself on Twitter. But, as reported, Ethereum is test-driving ETH 2.0 as their own total value locked in DeFi Surpasses $77 billion this week. The battle for supremacy is just getting started.
Useful Links
- What is Binance Smart Chain
- More Binance DeFi Dapps
- Binance Smart Chain Q1 2021 Report