Tech

MetisDAO TVL surges by 99,800% as the layer-2 race heats up

01/21/2022
Bitcoin Ethereum News

Attracting liquidity has become a de facto arms race in the growing decentralized finance (DeFi) landscape. Projects constantly battle to attract investors’ funds by offering enticing yields for crypto holders willing to take a risk and lock up their assets, and protocols use these funds to build out their products and attract attention from larger investors. 

One protocol that has been gaining traction in the total value locked (TVL) race is MetisDAO, a layer-two rollup platform designed to fully support the application and business migration from Web2 to Web3.

Top 10 TVL gainers over the past month. Source: CCK Ventures

Alongside the growth in the TVL on its protocol, the METIS token has also received a boost of momentum, with data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and CoinGecko showing that the price of METIS climbed from a low of $49.83 on Dec. 14 to a new all-time high at $323.54 on Jan. 16.

METIS/USD 3-hour chart. Source: TradingView

Three reasons for the growing TVL on the Metis protocol include the launch of multiple DeFi protocols on the network, added support for METIS-based trading pairs on cross-chain protocols and the network’s ability to offer Etherum users lower transaction costs and faster processing times.

Multiple DeFi protocols launch on Metis

The largest boost in value on Metis comes from the launch of several new DeFi protocols that are exclusively on the Metis network. These include NetSwap, Agora and Tethys Finance.

Top three protocols on METIS by total value locked. Source: Defi Llama

Together, these three protocols account for $325.24 million of the $353.36 million in value currently locked on Metis.

The partnership between METIS and Agora was only revealed on Jan. 19, meaning that it only took two days for the current TVL to be reached. This suggests that the overall TVL on the Metis chain will soon be headed higher.

NetSwap is the longest-running protocol on Metis, having conducted its fair launch on Dec. 6, 2021, it currently offers APRs for liquidity providers (LP) that range from 56% for WETH/m.USDT to 1,034% for BNB/NETT liquidity providers. NetSwap reached a total trading volume of $1 billion on Jan. 19, which represents $2.5 million worth of transaction fees that have been rewarded to liquidity providers.

Cross-chain bridge support

A second reason for the growing value hosted on the Metis network includes the added support from multiple cross-chain bridges that provide wider exposure to the Metis ecosystem.

Beefy Finance is one of the larger protocols that has added support for Metis-based tokens, including METIS, NETT and Metis-based versions of Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC) and Wrapped Ethereum (WETH).

Since announcing the partnership on Jan. 16, the TVL from the Metis network on Beefy Finance has reached $24.56 million.

Other cross-chain platforms that have added support for Metis include Pickle Finance, Poly Network, the Celer Network’s cBridge, BoringDAO, Relay Chain and Multichain.

Related: Blockchain assessment: How to assess different chains?

Metis goes cross-chain

The third factor attracting value to the Metis ecosystem is the low-fee, high throughput capabilities of the network that help Ethereum users save time and money.

The overall goal of Metis is to offer transactions that settle in less than a second and cost less than $1 in fees. According to the project’s white paper, this will be achieved by using the theoretically infinite scalability of the Metis Andromeda network.

These capabilities have led to the rapid growth of the Metis ecosystem as a whole, which now supports multiple DeFi protocols and nonfungible token (NFT) projects.

Most recently, Metis established a partnership with Curate, a cross-chain NFT marketplace that will enable gasless transactions.

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