The crypto industry is experiencing a surge in demand for Bitcoin, leading to a significant increase in the total value locked on-chain, which has surpassed $100 billion as of March 9. According to DefiLlama, the global total value locked in DeFi protocols has reached $100.1 billion, with a trading volume of over $10 billion in the past 24 hours. However, these figures are still lower than the previous record of $189 billion set in November 2021.
Leading the charts in terms of locked capital is the liquid staking protocol Lido, with $38.7 billion locked on-chain. EigenLayer and the Aave protocol follow closely behind with over $11 billion locked each.
This marks the first time in nearly two years that DeFi TVL has exceeded the $100 billion mark. The increase can be attributed to the positive sentiment returning to the crypto markets since the launch of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in January. The institutional demand for spot Bitcoin ETFs has driven the cryptocurrency to new all-time highs, surpassing $70,000 on March 8.
According to BitMEX Research, assets in Bitcoin ETFs reached $28 billion on March 8. This analysis excludes assets from Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust, which was converted to an ETF in January. There have been rumors circulating on social media platforms about OTC trading platforms running out of Bitcoin and turning to public exchanges to fulfill client orders. OTC desks primarily serve large-volume traders, including institutional investors.
Several centralized crypto exchanges, such as Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, and Bybit, experienced outages due to the increased trading volume when Bitcoin reached $60,000. To handle the surge in demand, Crypto.com hired 480 additional customer representatives.
The gains in Bitcoin have sparked a surge in memecoin prices in recent days. 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, according to data from Bitget Research. Popular tokens like Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Pepe (PEPE) have also seen significant gains of 168% and 165%, respectively. The market capitalization of memecoins currently stands at $61 billion.
As a result of the memecoin trend, Dogecoin (DOGE) and SHIB have now entered the top 10 tokens by market cap, with $26 billion and $20 billion, respectively.
In other news, there is a growing discussion about whether children should be exposed to Bitcoin at an early age. Some argue in favor of Bitcoin kids books as a way to educate and introduce children to the world of cryptocurrencies.