Riding The Wave News Summary #44
What is total value locked (TVL) in crypto and why does it matter?, Bitcoin Options Data Suggests Bearish Sentiment Among Investors, & more
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What is total value locked (TVL) in crypto and why does it matter?
Bitcoin Options Data Suggests Bearish Sentiment Among Investors
Blockchain, crypto set to take sports industry beyond NFT collectibles
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What is total value locked (TVL) in crypto and why does it matter?
Since decentralized finance (DeFi) boomed in 2020, financial market experts have come to terms with a new type of investment and have looked at ways to measure its performance.
Other than market capitalization, trading volume and total and circulating supply, total value locked (TVL) is one crypto indicator that is popular among DeFi investors to assess the overall value of assets – in United States dollar or any fiat currency – deposited across all DeFi protocols or in a single DeFi project.
DeFi assets include rewards and interest, coming from typical services such as lending, staking and liquidity pools, provided in the form of smart contracts. TVL in staking, for example, is a particularly useful indicator for investors looking to support the DeFi platforms with the highest rewards. It is the total value locked in the DeFi staking protocols and represents the amount of assets deposited by the liquidity providers.
For DeFi platforms to function, they require capital to be deposited as loan collateral or liquidity in trading pools. TVL matters because it indicates the capital’s impact on DeFi applications’ profits and usability for traders and investors.
When the TVL of a DeFi platform rises, it is followed by an increase of liquidity, popularity and usability. These factors contribute to the project’s success. A higher TVL means more capital is locked in DeFi protocols, with participants enjoying more considerable benefits and proceeds. A lower TVL implies lower availability of money, resulting in lower yields.
In 2022, Ethereum appeared as the largest network by DeFi TVL, accounting for over half of the total DeFi volume worldwide.
To give some perspective, the Ethereum DeFi network includes just under 500 protocols. It has a TVL of approximately $73 billion, with 64% of the market share, compared with BNB Smart Chain, which is the second-highest TVL at $8.74 billion in value at 7.7% of the market share, Avalanche with $5.21 billion and 4.5% of the market share and Solana with $4.19 billion and 3.68% of the market share.
Bitcoin Options Data Suggests Bearish Sentiment Among Investors
Activity on bitcoin (BTC) options suggests rising bearish sentiment among investors as the asset ranges between the $29,000 and $30,000 price levels.
Bitcoin dropped to nearly $24,000 in the past week amid systemic risks within the crypto ecosystem and inflation fears in the broader market. The asset has slid for seven straight weeks as of Friday.
The asset’s price movements have been highly correlated to the U.S. markets in the past few months, with poor earnings reports and hawkish comments from the Federal Reserve having an impact on bitcoin prices.
Put/call ratios for bitcoin open interest hit a 12-month high of 0.72 yesterday, research firm Delphi said in a note Friday, adding that the data indicated “bearish sentiment among investors.” Similar ratio levels were reached last May.
“The put/call ratio measures the amount of put buying relative to calls,” Delphi analysts explained in the note. “A high put/call ratio indicates that investors are speculating whether bitcoin will continue to sell off, or it could mean investors are hedging their portfolios against a downward move.”
“Last April, the put/call ratio traded as high as 0.96 before Bitcoin’s price dropped over 50% in May 2021,” the firm added.
At the time of writing, there over 63,000 bitcoin worth of open interest on options are set to expire on May 27.
Thursday’s surge in the put/call ratios surpassed previous 2022 highs of 0.69 in February and are up 38% from one-year lows of 0.44 in December, data from analytics tool skew shows.
With how nervous everyone is currently it’s looking unlikely that market sentiments will change in the short term. The one good point of bearish markets is that we may see some short but sharp drops that make great buy-in opportunities.
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