Terra (LUNA) edges Binance Smart Chain to hit record $20B of Total Value Locked

According to industry data, Terra (LUNA) has had a 68% increase from its December 1 total value locked TVL of $11.9 billion, to hit a record high of $20.05 billion TVL. That is, in under a month, users of the platform have continued to invest nonstop into the protocol in order to earn staking rewards.

Meanwhile, the price of LUNA — Terra’s native token, is also seeing a steady rise as it currently trades above $92 with a 31% surge in just a week, according to data from CoinMarketCap. The coin now has a total market capitalization of $33.9 billion, ranking 9th on the list of crypto projects.

LUNA Becomes The 2nd Largest Decentralized Finance Network

Ethereum remains way ahead of all decentralized finance DeFi networks in terms of TVL with $155.7 billion in TVL. And now, Terra has simply become the second-largest DeFi network, flipping Binance Smart Chain (BSC) in the process. Recall, BSC has a total of 225 products in its DeFi ecosystem with a TVL of $16.7 billion. But even that TVL has been on a decline all through the month.

Meanwhile, the consistent price increase of LUNA over the past few days might not be unrelated to investors buying spot LUNA to lock up in the Astroport lockdrop. This assumption was put forward as part of a Monday publication of a research note by Delphi Digital analytics firm.

Astroport is a new decentralized exchange and had gone live on December 14, airdropping ASTRO tokens to users who lock up their liquidity in the protocol.

There seems to be an obvious attraction as investors are looking to make free money from the lockdrop. This has seen the investors shifting towards Astroport, and thus taking out LUNA supply from the market.

And according to data sourced from DeFi Llama, the new decentralized exchange has raked in more than a billion dollars into the Terra ecosystem, with over 50% of that figure consisting of LUNA tokens.