Markets Roundup: Avalanche and Gaming Tokens Surge Amid DeFi Retreat

DeFi tokens in the gaming, metaverse, and Avalanche ecosystem bucked a downward trend in the markets in recent days. The latter topped all crypto categories with a seven-day runup of 33.3% according to CoinGecko data. New users continue to flock to the Avalanche network’s top protocols Trader Joe, Benqi, and Wonderland.

Top Gainers and Losers

DeFi assets have retrenched this past week, with the sector’s market cap declining 13.8% from a record high of $174B on Nov. 12 to $150B, according to CoinGecko.

DeFi assets currently account for 5.6% of global crypto dominance, with Terra’s $16.4B market cap comprising 11% of the sector’s total, followed by Chainlink with $12.7B, or 8.5%, and Uniswap with $9.6B or 6.4%.

Top Gainers among top 100 DeFi tokens

• Trader Joe (JOE) + 71.7%
• Benqi (QI) + 64.1%
• STP Network (STPT) + 21.4%
• GMX (GMX) + 20.2%
• Pangolin (PNG) + 19.3%

Biggest Losers among top 100 DeFi tokens

• Paraswap (PSP) – 49.1%
• Convex Finance (CVX) – 31.7%
• Popsicle FInance (ICE) – 30.8%
• Liquity (LQTY) – 28.1%
• Lido DAO (LDO) – 26.4%

Avalanche Ecosystem Picks Up Mojo

Avalanche has recently emerged as a leading scalable Layer 1 network boasting Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatibility, with Avalanche’s DeFi sector posting significant growth despite the broader market cooldown.

Avalanche tokens represent a combined capitalization of $36.5B, led by Avalanche (AVAX) with $29.1B, Wonderland (TIME) with $2.04B, the stablecoin TrueUSD (TUSD) with $1.24B, and Frax (FRAX) with $1.11B, according to CoinGecko. The sector’s remaining 63 assets share a market cap of $3B combined.

Low and micro-cap coins dominate Avalanche’s list of top gainers, with five of the six tokens boasting weekly gains of between 100% and 150% representing a capitalization of less than $4 million.

When only looking at Avalanche tokens with at least a nine-figure market cap, Crabada (CRA) tops the list after increasing 146.6% this week, followed by JOE with 71.7%, QI with 64.1%, Avalaunch (XAVA) with 43.1%, and AVA with 38.6%.

Overall, 54% or 36 of 67 Avalanche tokens gained for the week.

Gaming and Metaverse Tokens Rally

Sharing some of the same assets, the Gaming and Metaverse categories ranked fourth and sixth with market cap growth of 16.1% and 9.7% during the week, respectively.

Despite only 43 of 134 or 32% of gaming tokens rising in price this week, many of the sector’s top gainers included ten-figure protocols Gala (GALA) with 396%, UFO Gaming (UFO) with 53.8%, and The Sandbox (SAND) with 40%.

Four gaming tokens posted gains of between 150% and 300%, while 27 assets saw price increases of 20% or greater.

Metaverse tokens also did well, with 29 of 50 up for the week, led by Realm (REALM) with 182%, Spheroid Universe (SPH) with 152%, and Neos Credits (NCR) with 133%.

Network TVL

The total value locked (TVL) of the DeFi sector pulled back from its recent record high of $275B to sit at $258.5B according to DeFi Llama.

Across all chains, Curve is the largest protocol with a TVL of $20.4B and dominance of 7.9%, followed by MakerDAO with $18.2B or 7%, and Aave with $15.7B or 6.1%.

Two-thirds of TVL or $171B currently resides on the Ethereum network, followed by Binance Smart Chain with $18.7B or 7.2%, and Solana with $14.3 or 5.5%.

Despite the sector-wide pullback, Avalanche’s TVL is up more than 20% for the week, currently hitting all-time highs exceeding $12.4B. Terra currently ranks fifth with $9.54B, followed by Tron with $6.36B, Fantom with $4.93B, and Polygon with $4.66B.

Arbitrum continues to boast a significant lead in terms of Layer-2 DeFi TVL with $2.4B. dYdX ranks second with $975M, followed by the newly surging Boba Network with $523.6M, and Optimism with $340.2M.

Burn Rates

Ethereum’s burn rate has decliined over roughly the past week with 81,711 Ether (nearly $72 million) destroyed — equal to more than 8 ETH every minute.

Uniswap v2 was the top protocol by burned coins with 9,302 ETH destroyed, followed by OpenSea with 6,774, Tether with 4,742, and Uniswap v3 with 3,269.5 ETH according to Ultrasound Money.